Who to Partner With?

Your instinct says to partner with Cable. That might be fine for Charter or Cablevision, but the other cablecos - Cox, TWC, BHN - do not have long term plans to wholesale. You don't have to listen to me, but I hope you do. This is a stop gap measure at best.

It's easy to go to cable. It's the DSL replacement and you only feel comfortable selling small ticket items or replacement services to your market. And when I say sell, I really mean take an order for: dial-up to DSL to cable modem.

You should be selling satellite TV, especially if you are a WISP. But even if you are not. It is revenue that the Duopoly does NOT get.

Buy from other CLEC's like Zayo, Level3, FiberLight that have their own network. However, this means that you have to start SELLING Metro Ethernet services. This is not order taking.

And you will need services to bundle with Metro Ethernet like Hosted email, SAAS, backup, and Hosted PBX. But those can be outsourced to a partner.

On a control level, you hate to outsource. You can build it yourself - better and sell it cheaper. (Or so you think.) There is something to be said for speed to market. Reselling Hosted Exchange and Sharepoint from VAR Dynamics is fast to market and you are dealing with a white label specialist. Plus you don't have to buy all the gear, licenses and play with the updates and maintenance. You only have to support your customers and sell.

You can partner with Tech Data to offer wireless, hardware and soon cloud. SYNNEX and Ingram offer their partners cloud, software, managed services and hardware.

Sprint wants help selling its cellular data. They came to FISPA's meeting in Atlanta (and put up with some bull sh!t from ATT for being there) to tell you that they are now ready to wholesale cellular to you.

ConnectWise, Autotask, Kaseya and others will enable you to sell Managed IT services.

BYOD (Bring your own Device) means that IT staff are stretched thin. Offer to supplement them.

There is a lot of opportunity now as the workforce changes to virtual/remote/mobile - as the Internet (and technology) becomes mission critical to every business. Help them to understand and leverage technology and you can make money. Boundless opportunity right now, if you can accept that Change is in the air.