International Buyers’ Guide to U.S. Connectivity Services

Posted by Mary Stanhope on Tue, May 3, 2016

Expanding services beyond your network footprint into the U.S. can be the right turn to
profitability, but whether that experience will be profitable and accelerate your business or have you in the breakdown lane depends on how the expansion is planned. There is much more to consider than just plotting a route from point A to point B. Visibility into the local connectivity markets is critical to your success. Whether it is one location or a thousand, knowing you are choosing the right connectivity service at the right price for your customers’ Internet and business applications can be challenging.

Where do you start?

First, confer with your customer to identify which service attributes are must-haves and which are nice to have. Know as much about the customer U.S. location as you can – number of floors, suite number; know about their applications; know about where they need to go. Key business destinations are changing in the digital world and businesses now need reliable, secure, dedicated connectivity to private and public Cloud service providers. Global businesses headquartered outside the U.S. require you to know the location of business and applications needed to be accessed.

Next, get the right address. Addresses around the world can be tricky with boutique names. Now, with address in hand, you are ready to connect your customer. What do you do?

Call the service provider you have a relationship with and ask where they have service in the 9.8 million U.S. addresses?
Reach out to four or five of the 2,584 last-mile service providers in the U.S. and see what services, prices, and options they have at the location?
Type your locations into a network marketplace application like Global Capacity’s One Marketplace™ and see all the available services, prices and options in seconds?

The resounding industry response is option C. With Global Capacity’s One Marketplace, international service providers can make their journey of identifying the right service solutions and connecting U.S. locations simple. The One Marketplace platform delivers unprecedented transparency into the complex and highly fragmented U.S. data connectivity market by combining network delivery and service automation with a suite of customer and supplier applications in order to streamline and simplify the process of designing, pricing, buying, delivering and managing data connectivity solutions. Global Capacity’s One Marketplace is fundamentally changing how businesses buy connectivity.

The following directions will help guide international buyers around some of the bumps and potholes associated with buying U.S. connectivity services:

The first step is finding an easy way to look at the specific locations you want to connect into, understand what the available services are in each location, and match the right network services to your customers’ performance and financial requirements. While learning what is available in larger markets with relatively robust service availability such as New York or Dallas may be simpler, gaining a comprehensive understanding of exactly what services and off-net access circuits are obtainable in the smaller cities such as Memphis, TN, Selma, LA or Lawrenceville, GA can prove quite challenging.

One Marketplace provides transparency into access pricing and visibility of capacity across multiple technologies and geographies. This makes finding the right connectivity solutions across the U.S. simple, providing international network service providers with up-to-the-minute market information detailing connectivity pricing, availability and services at each location their customers want to connect.

With all of the service options in front of you, make sure you apply the unique customer requirements to the options available. It does not matter if these requirements are technical, performance or business; in One Marketplace applications, you have the capability to filter all available services down to only those that meet your requirements. You will see the impact to available services and pricing in real-time. One Marketplace also has the ability to save different designs so you can review trade-offs and make the best informed decision with your customer. One other great feature is that you can go into a single location that does not conform to the overall project requirements and find the next best solution, ensuring that site does not fall out of the opportunity. The flexibility of the application gives you visibility and control to make a winning design for your customer.

Now that you have selected your services, it is time to submit service order forms and sign agreements. Multiple locations and multiple services traditionally meant dealing with the complexity of ordering, contracting and provisioning from multiple service providers. This step, if not managed closely, adds unwanted complexity and delay in the turn-up of a customers’ services. Global Capacity’s One Marketplace is one Master Services Agreement (MSA) to simplify the procurement and management of network connectivity services to any location. With the One Marketplace application, once you have applied the customer requirements to select the right service options, you simply click to order a single service or your full project. The application gives you full visibility into each order at each location. You are able to review, verify and enter any unique location details online using the same order form, no matter the location, service or transport. The ease of online ordering extends through service delivery and turn-up so you have visibility into the progress of your order from thousands of miles away any time of the day.

The next step requires patience. You know what you want, you have placed the order and now, you need to wait for the service to be provisioned, tested and turned up. Information makes the waiting easier. It is important to know the date of your install and who is doing the turn-up. Online visibility into order status and working with a single team to manage service delivery at all of your customer locations makes this process simple. Global Capacity’s provisioning team manages thousands of services across hundreds of networks each month and will manage all of your orders. They are experienced with the task of managing multiple suppliers so you do not have to. Complementing Global Capacity’s in-house provisioning team is their in-house field services team. This team of local technicians delivers CPE installation, service configuration, and demarc extensions. Even with all of the research done with the customer about the location, it is always reassuring to know that the team installing your service can handle the unknown situations.

When it comes to ongoing service availability management, an experienced 7x24x365 network support team in North America provides international service providers convenience and peace of mind, even when they are thousands of miles away. The ease of online visibility into service status and working with a single team to manage service availability at all of your customer locations extends through service management so you have visibility from thousands of miles away any time of the day. When and if there is a service issue or repair needed, that same dedicated field services team of local technicians is available for service repair and restoration. Service management is further simplified for international network service providers with a single point of contact for resolution ownership, one consolidated bill and access to a customer application providing inventory, ticketing and new service upgrade option information whenever they need it.

Follow these guidelines and expanding services beyond your network footprint into the U.S. will drive to profitability. Visibility into the local connectivity markets – service availability, pricing, simple ordering, installation time frames, demarc location, ongoing service availability and simplified billing - is critical to your success. Whether it is one location or a thousand, knowing you are choosing the right connectivity service at the right price for your customers’ Internet and business applications can be easy with the right partner. Global Capacity works with international network service providers, dramatically simplifying and accelerating their ability to deliver network services in the U.S. with One Marketplace.

Meet with the Global Capacity team at ITW 2016 in Chicago, IL to learn more.

You can also r equest a call with a service specialist to discuss how you get started buying simple, efficient, cost-effective connectivity to the US.