TA Daily News Blog

"Everybody Loves Chris" or "Why Agents Aren't Worried About Qwest"

 Posted 4/23/10
By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email

Well this afternoon Qwest had their first conference call with all their telecom agent business channel partners and pretty much said what was expected, "It's too early to know for sure exactly what's going to happen about anything."

I spoke to a couple more TA members that are Qwest master agents and one theme is being repeated quite a bit, "CenturyTel really wanted the Qwest business sales machine and they're putting Chris Ancell in charge of anything that has to do with business sales for the merged company." Chris is mentioned quite positively in...

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Filed in Qwest Blog By TA

MegaPath + Covad = Good Stuff (for agents)?

Posted 4/9/10 
By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email 

There's not a lot of merger activity going on in the telecom agent and channel partner industry so when two companies we think we know pretty well decide to combine forces it's a pretty interesting deal. When I saw that MegaPath and Covad, two TA vendor members, were merging I said to myself, "Wow" quickly followed by "I wonder why?"

I'll be the first to admit that while I have a business degree from a real college, I'm no mergers and acquisitions wizard. I do own my own business though and outside of making my clients happy I pretty much just think of two things all day long, "How can I cut costs or increase revenue?".

I imagine most business owners think the same way so I applied that thinking to MegaPath & Covad. In reading through the press releases on the subject, I drew the conclusion that Covad was the network of choice that Covad put a lot of their customers on to them provide all the MegaPath managed solutions. By merging with Covad are they going to really going to lower their wholesale costs all that much? What do they get by "owning Coved" that they didn't already have?  "Fewer network options and more headaches", I initially thought. Why buy a car when you can drive the one you like whenever you want anyway, right?

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Filed under MegaPath  CLEC

Why Nuvox Loves the Windstream Deal (see Dan Sterling Video)

Dan Sterling did not look worried.

Windstream VP of Dealer Sales Dan Sterling tells the Telarus Agent Expo audience why he went from slightly concerned to very happy when he learned that Windstream (an "old-fashioned" residential copper-based carrier with tons of cash but declining revenues) would be purchasing NuVox, a business based CLEC.

Sterling assured the Telarus agent audience that he'd been told by everyone at Windstream with an opinion that "they want us to be and stay very aggressive".

Click the video below to view and hear Dan's comments to Telarus' top agents.

Click here to see the full blog post including Dan Sterling's video from the Telarus Agent Expo in Las Vegas last month. (There's also a super secret extra PRETTY FUNNY video included).

Post filed under Windstream, Telarus, Master Agency, CLEC & TA Expo blogs