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Take Serviceability on the Go with a Mobile-Friendly Fiber Finder

By Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP on Jun 10, 2021 12:00:00 AM

Manual serviceability research, which used to be a necessary cost of doing business for bandwidth providers, is tedious, time-consuming, and prone to error.

Fortunately, modern automation technology has transformed the way bandwidth providers do business, allowing them to take serviceability on the go with the right tools. In fact, thanks to automated serviceability research, the days of combing through data and staring at fiber maps may be entirely a thing of the past.

With that said, offering a solid, mobile-friendly digital experience that aligns with modern consumer preferences is essential for achieving success in today’s climate. Most serviceability tools are designed for desktop, because data and mapping technology does not lend itself well to smaller mobile footprints

In this article, we’ll share tips for evaluating mobile-friendliness, plus discuss why it matters in the bandwidth service industry.

BandwidthFinder is the solution to your telecom serviceability worries. Learn more.

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How to Get the Best Fiber-Optic Access

By Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP on Jun 3, 2021 12:00:00 AM

Fiber is often one of the most coveted forms of connectivity among telecom customers. But as a relatively new form of telecom infrastructure, fiber-optic access can be limited, depending on the customer’s location.

In cases where customers are seeking telecom services for a set of addresses, fiber-optic access may be fragmented, with only a percentage of those addresses able to connect with fiber service. In addition, presence is only one aspect of determining great fiber connectivity for a customer.

To fully evaluate fiber and determine which options offer the best fiber-optic access, telecom providers need to invest in research tools that can process complex fiber data and account for different variables that affect fiber performance. Here are some practical ways telecom businesses can connect their customers to the best fiber service possible.

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What Is Carrier Aggregation in Telecom?

By Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP on May 20, 2021 12:00:00 AM

Given the significant cost of building telecom infrastructure to serve a single market, telecom providers have to pick and choose where they build their own technology, and where they’re content to lease the use of infrastructure built and maintained by other providers—including their competitors.

In telecom, leasing of infrastructure to enable local network access is known as carrier aggregation, and it’s an important component of the business models for both carriers and solution providers.

Solution providers, for example, can use carrier aggregation to build a regional or nationwide network of telecom infrastructure. From there, the provider can use suppliers to lease access on a scale ranging from local markets and regions to individual buildings. Carriers, meanwhile, rely on aggregators as a demand driver to justify expanding their coverage area, increasing their market share in targeted regions.

Although carrier aggregation offers a lot of potential value to solution providers, the cost and resource investment of this process can be a significant obstacle for providers to clear without software solutions to simplify this process.

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Bandwidth Service Providers and Data Privacy Control

By Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP on May 13, 2021 12:00:00 AM

When performing telecom research online, the quality of your research is determined, first and foremost, by your ability to access relevant, quality data.

For bandwidth service providers, this important data comes in the form of public and private data sets that can be combined together to build a complete picture of bandwidth at any given address. As telecom sales professionals seek out the best bandwidth serviceability for their clients, they need the ability to access this full spectrum of data—and to sort and filter data to generate valuable insights relevant to any client’s needs

The right software tools can help your sales team and partners access public and private telecom data, bring disparate data together, and enable customized views to support efficient, accurate service—giving your business the insights it needs to optimize service configuration and quoting to meet your clients’ needs.

Here’s how an automated, data-connected tool like BandwidthFinder can support your research process.

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6 Things You Need to Know About On-Net and Off-Net Buildings

By Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP on May 6, 2021 12:00:00 AM

When connecting customers to the best service options at their address, the difference between on-net and off-net buildings can be a big one. Service packages and the overall configure price quote (CPQ) process need to know whether any telecom services are on-net at a given location, whether it’s a carrier you represent or a competitor in the local market.

For our purposes in this article, “on-net” refers to a carrier that owns network facilities at a particular location. “Off-net” refers to a solution provider that connects the location to their own network by purchasing the network facility through a supplier relationship.

Many consumers and businesses may not think about on-net versus off-net properties when choosing a location, but the availability of these services can have a big impact on both the services and service package pricing that makes sense for these customers. Here are six things you should know about the differences between on-net and off-net buildings.

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Taking Bandwidth Solutions up a Notch: Swap Data Stacks for Careful Recommendations

By Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP on Apr 29, 2021 12:00:00 AM

Data stacks provide an essential service in organizing data sets to store information and support easy management and processing of this data. But the infrastructure of these data stacks can vary widely, depending on the supporting software behind them.

Outdated or limited data stacks can create limitations for what you’re able to achieve through these structures, especially when it comes to evaluating bandwidth solutions and performing other essential services as a telecom business.

If you’re working with an existing data stack that requires a lot of manual lifting and restricts your data processing capabilities, you might be able to improve your telecom customer experience by upgrading the data stacks used in your bandwidth solutions.

Here are some of the benefits that can come with swapping out your data stacks.

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Top 4 CPQ Telecom Technologies Solving Provider Challenges

By Don Roots, VP of Sales, MasterStream ERP on Apr 22, 2021 12:00:00 AM

The growing pains brought on by digital transformation aren't endured just for the sake of putting businesses through unprecedented challenges. While the transition to these new solutions is often a gradual and sometimes difficult process, the end result of digital transformation provides benefits made possible only through modern solutions to long-standing configure, price, quote (CPQ) telecom problems.

This transformation is alleviating multiple pain points and limitations that have plagued telecom providers for years—and which have only gotten worse as telecom infrastructure has grown more complex. To keep pace with both the expectations of customers and the task of managing complexity around CPQ telecom services, new technologies are taking an algorithmic and rules-based approach that is necessary to build a sustainable telecom business model.

Here are four CPQ telecom technologies solving these pressing industry challenges.

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Why Connectivity Is Critical When Selecting a Bandwidth Provider

By Matt Clark - President, MasterStream ERP on Apr 15, 2021 12:00:00 AM

In business and in our day-to-day lives, we all live in a connected world. When it comes to choosing a bandwidth provider to support your business through telecom infrastructure, this connectivity takes on a different meaning altogether.

Although connectivity is important to any company that conducts at least some of its business online, the proliferation of digital tools and cloud-based business solutions has turned connectivity into a mission-critical service that must be accounted for when choosing a bandwidth provider.

Here’s a look at the way connectivity affects your business operations, your customer experience, and your ability to keep pace with the changes brought on by digital transformation.

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Why Telecom Sales Automation Is Essential

By Don Roots, VP of Sales, MasterStream ERP on Apr 8, 2021 12:00:00 AM

No matter where or how it’s used, sales automation is always hailed for one big reason: When it’s working on your behalf, you can count on it making your life easier.

Make no mistake—when software tools offer automated sales solutions to power your business operations, even the most reluctant adopters of this technology will eventually concede that access to automation tools helps them do their job better, and often with less stress involved. But that’s far from the extent of automation’s benefits, and those benefits play a direct role in maximizing ROI for your business.

For telecom sales channels and departments, automation offers some important material gains that improve on-the-job performance and raise the ceiling for revenue generation from these activities. Here are some of the biggest impacts automation can make on your business model.

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Tiresome Research Make Way For Bandwidth Solutions

By Don Roots, VP of Sales, MasterStream ERP on Mar 25, 2021 12:00:00 AM

The old way of researching bandwidth solutions is labor-intensive. Between tracking down location data and inputting data points, telecom businesses lose a lot of time to a research process that—despite its tedious process—doesn’t always deliver the most reliable results.

Manual research isn't just costly and threatened by manual input errors. They also restrict your company’s ability to scale its service to a larger customer base. And, as the demand grows more complex, involving larger sets of location data that both complicates data acquisition and input variables, the research demands of location and bandwidth solutions only continue to grow.

New research tools are desperately needed to help telecom businesses keep pace with the modern world. Fortunately, automated tools and customized dashboards are making it easier than ever to bring this digital transformation to your own bandwidth research process.

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