Tuesday, March 09, 2010

How to SELLECOM: Fat Pipe

At the FISPA Conference at the Orlando Airport on March 23-24, I will be moderating a panel of carriers (all FISPA vendor members) - NITEL, XO, AT&T, FPL and KDL. The panel discussion is Pitching Fat Pipe to Phat Clients. I've done this as a webinar twice before as How to SELLECOM: Fat Pipe with Level3 and AboveNet.

[FTC disclosure notice: I am a sub-agent that can quote and provision circuits from 20+ carriers including XO, NITEL, Level3, Above.Net and Ma Bell.]

What is Fat Pipe? Well, it's greater than a T1 (1.54 MB) and even greater than a DS3 (44.2 MB). Metro Ethernet, FastE, GigE, OC-x, Waves and DWDM. I know. too much slang.

Metro Ethernet is local network connectivity that ranges from 2MB over copper (or fiber) to 10 Gigabit over fiber. Hatteras sells gear that BellSouth, XO and now Windstream use to turn copper pairs into Metro E transport to your customer. (That's another session called Turning Copper into Gold!)

FastE is Fast Ethernet or 100 MB transport (Layer 2) or transit (Layer 3 = with IP). GigE is 1000Mbps. OC-x is optical carrier level like OC-3 (155Mbps), OC-12 (622Mbps) and OC-48 (2.4 Gbps).

Waves aren't the ocean, but optical waves, primarily carried via DWDM over glass. The carrier lights up a color at a specific wavelength through the glass of the fiber strand to transmit data as a photon.

Note: Ciena explains fiber optic transmission via wavelength division multiplexing. Cisco explains MAN, WAN, and WDM.

You don't need to know all that to sell it, but it helps if you know the terms.

Why do you want to sell Fat Pipe?

You want to sell it because it’s big margin! One Metro E circuit can have more margin than 20 DSL customers.

What will we cover in the session?

  • Who’s buying it?
  • Why are they buying it?
  • What’s the sales trigger?
  • Who’s making the decision to buy?
  • Who are the Phat Clients?
  • How do you find them?

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