Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, we uncover some tips & tricks when dealing with Telco's (Telecommunication Carriers).  Everyone loves to hate their telco, right? More often than not it's a story of time delays, frustrations and little (if any) customer service. It's time to talk to Andy!  Enjoy this session as we dive head on into the world of carriage, connectivity, and care - ensuring you, the customer, get's the right telco solution to suit YOUR business needs, not THEIRS!  For more details contact [email protected] or visit www.taylormadesales.com.au  Full Episode Transcript: (Intro music with voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert, unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. (Music fades) Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone, it's Leanne Taylor here from Taylormade Sales, and I'm really excited to have a long-time friend and colleague in the studio with me today, Andy Suggars. Welcome. Andy Suggars: Hello, hello. Good to be here. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for coming in. So, today we're talking about all things Telco, and carriage, wholesale carriage. Everyone loves to hate Telcos. You know, what does it mean? What do you do, Andy, and why should our customers come and chat with you? So, tell us all that. Andy Suggars: Having worked for large Telcos and service providers over the decades, I've seen the challenges that customers face with their carriage and how that impacts projects that they're trying to roll out. And those carriage services can be delayed, which then impacts the delivery of whatever project is reliant on that carriage service. So, what I've essentially wanted to do was provide a service to customers where they can lean on us, they can lean on our expertise and our contacts within the Telco industry to essentially take away that pain and the requirement of them having to manage what's coming down the line from their Telcos. Leanne Taylor: One of the things I love, Andy, about working with you on these projects is how you go about scoping a customer's Telco requirements. Because obviously, if they're with a particular carrier, whether it's Telstra or Optus, or Aussie Broadband, they're not potentially going to tell the client, "Oh, there are three other carriers in the pit with me and you can have diverse carriage and there's a whole bunch of options available." The Telcos are obviously only interested in selling their flavour. Can you maybe elaborate on what that scope looks like and how you do it? Andy Suggars: What we typically do because we're a wholesale partner for the major Telcos and also a lot of smaller, business-to-business-only Telcos is we carry out a qualification process for your sites and the service types you want to get. So, if it's internet, we'll go out and do a service qualification with the various carriers. Some will say, "No, we don't have fibre there," or "We can't provide a service." Great, we just cross them off the list and move on to the ones that do. Then we discuss with them what capacity and what cost it's going to be. Now, for customers who want to have diversity in their network, we will look at multiple carriers. So, Telstra comes down the street on this side, Aussie Broadband comes down the street on that side, etcetera. We try to get the most diverse services into your site as possible just to mitigate things like diggers going through cables out in the street or a particular carrier having routing issues and that sort of stuff. Leanne Taylor: And that's one of the things that still baffles me today: so many businesses go offline, if you like, because of a carrier outage. Now, they've all had them and they will continue to have them, but it still baffles me how in today's day and age, businesses are not doing diverse carriage. And whether that's because they're not aware, or they're being sold to by their primary carrier... Andy Suggars: Sometimes it's not available. Leanne Taylor: Well, sometimes, exactly. So can you touch on what diverse carriage is, why it's important, and how it's actually quite simple to achieve? Andy Suggars: Yeah. So diverse carriage is pretty much what it says in the title: having two alternative service paths, whether it be a physical cable, an LTE service, or microwave wireless—whatever it is. You've got the physical diversity there, and then there's also the logical diversity around carriers, routing paths, data centre egress, etcetera. So having a mix of those two, it essentially starts with what's in the ground outside your building, and then we can go from there. The other component that we add on top of that is Layer 2 services. So we can provide a mixed carrier in the ground with a common service on top of that, which then has routed paths out to different data centres, for instance. Leanne Taylor: And that was a great project we did a number of years ago for a customer. I remember the conversation clearly on a call, saying, "You know, we're upgrading some firewalls and, oh God, now I've got to go from a one-gig link to a 10-gig link. There's six months of my life talking to my Telco that I'm not going to get back." And it was great that you jumped in on that conversation and you actually had that stood up within two weeks. Now, that customer looked at me and said, "I've been in IT a long time, and I've never seen that happen." So, go into a bit of detail about that particular engagement and how you go about providing this amazing service that people don't know exists, I guess. Andy Suggars: Yeah, so this was during COVID, so the bandwidth requirements suddenly were tenfold higher, and the current capacity wasn't going to cope. And then also business continuity—that's where the diversity sort of comes in. What if that link fails? We're offline. So, just back to our same processes and structures, we just go through service qualification. What do you need? What sort of capacity? What type of service? Do you need a point-to-point, dark fibre, or just straight internet? We just work through our—it's almost like a checklist of what they want—and then we go to market and see what carriers are available that can do it, when they can do it, and how much it costs. Then we can present those different options back to the customer, and they can essentially choose what they want to do and how they want to weigh it up. "Yeah, we're happy to pay more to get it in tomorrow," or, "It's our secondary service that we're putting in, so it's less important. We can wait a few extra weeks or months to get the exact thing we want at the price we want." Part of that delivery is making sure the Telcos don't just flick an email out and leave it at that. You have someone that sits on your side of the table to chase them down and make sure they're delivering what they've said they're going to, and when. It's all well and good to place an order and then find out, "Oh, there are civil works that need to be done," which means council involvement, digging up streets, and six to eight-month lead times. Well, there might be a carrier that's already there that we can light up in six weeks. Leanne Taylor: And that's one of the great benefits, I guess, and the joys of what you do: you're giving the customer options. When they're dealing primarily with one Telco, the Telco is only giving them their options and not giving them the context of what the big picture looks like. So I really enjoy those conversations initially with you when you've done your site audits. We sit down with the customer and go through, as you said, here's the price and this is the timeline. And you're right, customers can then make an informed decision. "I need this link in quick; I'm prepared to pay for it," or, "It's not that urgent, and we can wait." But they've also got a breakdown of every carrier—or not every, but maybe four, five, or six different carriers depending on the scope—and actually have a clear understanding as to who's available, what capacity, and what price they are. And I think, particularly in this current state of the market where customers are being very frugal with their budget spends, it's really important to call out that your carriage is something you can save a lot of money on. So even if you're not due for a carriage renewal this year (it could be next year), it is still very much worth the conversation with Andy—which is a pre-sales conversation—to go through and actually understand your sites, what's available, and what your options are. You can take that spreadsheet of information and make some plans for next year, or raise a business case based on, "Hey, we're paying X, but I've got information here that says we can start saving $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 a month." Go and have a chat with the CFO in the business and go, "You know, what can we do?" It might just be something that you figure out at renewal time, or it might be Andy having a quick call to your carrier and seeing what he can renegotiate on your behalf. Andy Suggars: Yeah, so we don't just put the options in front of you and say, "Choose what you want." We'll run through them as to, "This option has this, they're pretty good. That option has that." And we also then go back to the carriers and say, "Hey, Carrier A over there is offering this at this price. Can you match that? Or can you get close to it?" Especially when you're talking around diversity. I've seen, for instance, one carrier is $2,000 and another carrier is $5,000. It's like, well, what's the difference? So, being able to go back to them and say, "Well, hang on, you're out unless you can get in cooee of the $2,000 carriage." The customer wants diversity, and we'd like to have you as one of those diverse paths. It's a headache that customers no longer have to deal with. We're essentially a filter between your business and the Telco, especially when it's not an area of expertise or something that you deal with every day. Every couple of years, you call them up and say... well, they probably call you and ask you to renew a contract without doing anything. Leanne Taylor: Yeah. So Andy, a lot of customers will have their primary carrier and say, "Oh, you know, I've got my backup as a wireless or 4G or what have you." Talk to me about that. Andy Suggars: Yeah, so that's great. It gives you cable diversity out in the street. If someone digs up the fibre, you've got a 4G wireless connection that's your backup service. The problem with that being the same carrier is that if they have an issue with their exchange or within their routing domain, that could potentially affect both their 4G and their fibre services. Then you're kind of left isolated. Leanne Taylor: You're still offline. Andy Suggars: Yeah, you're still offline. And I've had a customer that that has actually happened to. So, we moved their fibre network to a different carrier and retained the LTE network with the existing one. Now they have that diversity of cable and lead-in type, as well as the actual carriage service on top of that. Leanne Taylor: How often should you test your carriage failover? Andy Suggars: Ah, it's one of those questions. You've got a 4G SIM or a second fibre service and you never test it out. It could be that the service is working fine, but you've done a switch config or something on your side of the network that's going to hamper that failover process. So, doing regular failover checks is important, especially if you've got similar service types. If you've got two 1-gig services with different carriers, switch them over, run it for a day on the other service, and just make sure that one, it stays connected, and two, that performance is meeting expectations. Leanne Taylor: Because that's something that happens, I hear quite regularly—something's gone down but the failover didn't happen, or there was an issue and the backup didn't kick in, and that adds to an already stressful situation. Andy Suggars: Yeah, it's pretty common where it's a carrier-provided backup on top of their primary service. They have it in a router, and then there are timers that need to be counting down and matched, so you might be offline for five minutes, or the next hop is reachable, so it doesn't actually fail over. It becomes less of an issue where there's SD-WAN involved because it doesn't really look at the carrier perspective; it maintains two active paths. And providing that connectivity and that failover performance is a pretty critical part of the carriage side conversation as well. Leanne Taylor: So talk to me about your WAN Edge services. One of the great things I love about the customers we currently work on together is that if something happens in the network—whether it's carriage or something on the customer side—you kind of sit across both in some cases. So you're that single pane of glass, I guess, where you know what's happening before the customer does sometimes, and you can say, "No, I'm already on to that. That's a telco issue," or you're ringing them saying, "Hey, something's just dropped and you need to check your routers or switching." So, talk us through that. Andy Suggars: Yeah, in the corporate world, it's the "single throat to choke" sort of thing. Funnily enough, getting into carriage came off the back of our WAN Edge services—so, providing routers, SD-WAN, firewalls, all that kind of stuff to customers. I had one customer come and say, "Oh, we've got to redo our MPLS network. Is that something you can help us with?" And at the time, it was like, "No, I don't do that sort of stuff." And then seeing how that process played out for them and how bad it was, and the end state they ended up with, stuck for three years... That's where I looked into it, and I was like, "Okay, yeah, I can do this quite well." So now I'm providing the edge device that connects to the carrier network as well as the carriage on top of it. If a customer has a problem, they call us. And instead of us going onto our device and saying, "Oh, everything looks fine here, call your carrier," or the carrier saying, "I can see the network's up, it must be something on your side," we're across both of them. So we'll just look into both, look across whether it's the LAN side or the carrier side, and just assist you in getting it fixed, as opposed to saying, "This is not my problem, it's someone else's." Leanne Taylor: Yeah, and that finger-pointing happens far too often, I think. Andy Suggars: It takes so long to resolve because it's not anyone's problem. Until someone has proved that it's someone else, nothing really gets done. So rather than wasting time on those particular aspects of troubleshooting, we look at the whole service from your side right through to the Telco side. And we either engage the Telco, raise a support ticket with them, and chase that up, or we'll talk with the vendor of the WAN Edge services and raise a TAC case with them if it's potentially a bug, or if there's been a configuration change, then we assist in remediating that. Leanne Taylor: And that's not necessarily you offering that as a managed service. It's professional services and a collaboration with the customer as well, because often they want to keep control of their edge devices. There are a lot of MSPs out there, and that's where you do see some of that finger-pointing going on between the network team and the Telco. So, explain how that fits in if a customer is saying, "I want to keep control of my network." How would you fit into that scenario? Andy Suggars: Yeah, sure. We're essentially just a phone call for assistance, a "phone-a-friend" type thing. If you've got your own in-house guys that look after your firewalls and your networks, that's no issue at all. We don't expect to take over full management of it. We have a triage process and a troubleshooting process that we go through as resolvers, essentially. So if there's a problem that you need help with, and you're not getting any love from your carrier, or it might be an area of expertise that your guys just haven't seen before and are not across, then we can jump in and help. Or, we can do a managed service. Leanne Taylor: You can do both. Leanne Taylor: Excellent, Andy. Well, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a lot of fun having you in the office, and I think the Telco diverse carriage conversation is one I love having. It can save customers a lot of money, and it keeps the Telcos—the big guys—honest as well. So, I think if you are planning or have your Telco renewal coming up this year or into next, it's definitely worth reaching out to Andy and having a chat. We'd love to have that conversation with you and see if we can find you some money back in your pocket. So, it's great, Andy. Thanks for coming in, and we'll see you next time. Andy Suggars: No worries. My pleasure. (Outro music with voiceover) Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, and here at Taylormade Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date and informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time. (Music fades)    

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