A certain VP at a currently bankrupt provider asked me if the industry isn’t better with a strong CLEC. I said of course the industry is better with a strong CLEC. CLECs have been the cornerstone of the channel for many years.
However, there are few large and stable CLECs left in the game. And his company was not stable.
Would a channel partner sell an unstable company’s services? No business buyer likes uncertain.
No channel partner wants to deal with uncertainty either. Our commissions are the lifeblood of our businesses. Look how well evergreen clauses in contracts work when the carrier goes BK.
Granite and Bullseye are probably the larger CLECs left that are solid.
GTT is like Birch or Fusion – a sloppy mix of merged providers.
The CEOs of Birch, GTT, Paetec and Fusion must have gone to the same school as Ruberg. He was CEO of Tampa’s Intermedia Communications, the first billion dollar CLEC. It sold to MCI for $3B in stock in 2001. MCI only wanted Digex and sold the rest to Allegiance Telecom, which was later acquired by XO.
Zayo has been a handful to work with. They were just taken private by private equity. The statement said management is staying in place, but no one knows if they will get any friendlier to the channel – or fix their internal and organizational issues.
There are a handful of smaller resellers who are channel friendly, like TPX, NITEL, Ntegrated, APXnet and AireSpring.
Otherwise it is ILEC or Cable – the 4 Horsemen: Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Charter.
Altice USA is out there, but I have no idea how channel friendly. Cox is tough on the channel (referral program).
Sprint – in the middle of being acquired by T-Mobile with FCC approval.
Frontier is uncertain due to too much debt combined with service issues. Talk of bankruptcy at FTR, too.
CenturyLink is still trying to figure out the Level3 acquisition. There are stories about spinning off the ILEC consumer and SMB business. Revenues are trending downward as the ILEC operations are rural and losing ground to cable competition. Hence, the spin off talk. Yet internally, it is a question of which legacy business do you want to do business with – and who has login privileges? US West, Qwest, Embarq, CenturyTel, Level3, TWT?
There are thousands of cloud providers that channel partners can sell for SaaS, IaaS, UCaaS, Cloud Contact Center, VPS, VDI and so much more. But it all rides on network. It all requires an ISP. And if you sell WAN, you want it to be reliable – a quality network.
Cogent, FiberLight, Crown Castle, Masergy, NTT, WOW! are contenders.
Who are you selling?