Week In Research: Optimum Business tops customer service study; AT&T in Leaders Quadrant for Asia/Pac network services

SMBs like one neck to choke: Assigning a single point of contact to landline voice business subscribers can significantly increase customer satisfaction, a new report from J.D. Power and Associates says. The firm conducted a study of home-based, small-to-midsize (SMB) and enterprise businesses on a 1000-point scale. Small-to-midsized businesses saw the biggest difference in problem resolution rates when a single contact was assigned, with Optimum Business ranking highest in customer satisfaction among that category. News release.

AT&T APAC star shines: AT&T (NYSE: T) has made the Leaders Quadrant of Gartner Research's Magic Quadrant for Asia/Pacific Network Service Providers 2010 report. The report "evaluates providers of international network services to multinational corporations with networks in the Asia/Pacific region." News release.

Google's not so safe: In a recent poll of 200 companies conducted by Nemertes Research, about 50.2 percent of those responding had reservations about using Google for unified communications and cloud services (UC&C). They offered legitimate reasons for not jumping on the Google bandwagon: data security, as many were suspicious that their information could be indexed by search engines, and a lack of robust customer support. Story.

EU's data retention: Data retention is a powerful tool for law enforcement agencies--so much so that the EU put it into action with the European Data Retention Directive. But as Frost & Sullivan points out in a new white paper, the EU "did not take into account the heterogeneous nature of the networks and systems of most telecom providers. This complication has made it difficult for companies to meet the Directive obligations and it is anticipated that formidable challenges will grow over time," the firm says in a news release. Demands on data center capacity and a lack of standardization are two significant issues.

Traffic pumping on the rise: Traffic pumping costs wireless carriers about $95 million annually, and the cost for wireline carriers could be much higher, a study from Connectiv Solutions has found. The practice--also known as access stimulation--involves a telephone carrier like a CLEC (competitive local exchange carrier) partnering with third-party companies offering free services like conference bridges, then charging inflated access fees to terminate a call and sharing the revenues with that partner. "Our analysis revealed a number of interesting points," says David Knutson of Connectiv Solutions. "Among these, over the course of six months, the cost of traffic pumping increased by nearly 50%"--a result cost-conscious providers should not ignore.  News release.

Connectiv Solutions traffic pumping

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