"Bandwidth Advisors" - www.bandwidthadvisors.com

Fri Mar 25 18:43:39 UTC 2005

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Tim Pozar" <pozar at lns.com>
To: "Hannigan, Martin" <hannigan at verisign.com>
Cc: <nanog at merit.edu>
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 7:29 PM
Subject: Re: "Bandwidth Advisors" - www.bandwidthadvisors.com

--- snip ---

> I know a bunch of consultants out there (me being one, Bill Woodcock,
> etc.) that do not take money from vendors they recommend.  How can a
> client of a consultant really know they have the best deal when the
> "consultant" will not investigate all of the options out there?

how do you know that a consultant that you pay will investigate all the
options out there? they may not be aware of all the options or may not want
to take up so much time working on your deal, for example. good agents have
the same reasons to find you a good deal as good consultants do - repeat
business and good reputation in the industry. both bad consultants and
agents exist who see it differently. comparing a well-respected consultant
such as bill to a hypothetical bad agent is an excercise devoid of meaning.

> Even if I did pay the fee, that means that their clients
> can't get the best deal as I need to raise my fees to client to cover
> the "small residual payment" going to "Bandwidth Advisors".

no, you pay their fee out of the same pot you use to pay your sales guys,
your marketing guys (if you have any), your advertising/marketing expenses
etc. they bring the deal to you, meaning you've spent $0 to acquire the lead
up to that point. unless you operate on word of mouth only and do sales
yourself (and pay yourself $0/hr), $0 < $your_avg_customer_acquisition_cost.

in short, it's the customer's choice whether they'd like to do the legwork
themselves, hire a consultant or use an agent who is paid by the seller. a
consultant may find you the best deal, but if you're not buying much the
overall cost per meg may be higher than list when you factor in the
consulting fees, for example. using an agent in this case may make sense.
some agents offer direct ports and do their own billing, so you can get a
better price by taking advantage of the volume pricing they enjoy. the world
is not black and white.

> For those that don't know... I am now the COO of UnitedLayer.  It sounds
> like, since I am not going to pay the "extortion" fee to Bandwidth
> Advisors, that their consultants won't know about our pricing and
> services.

i'm curious to see by what feat of logic you managed to classify what they
do as extortion. they have leads which you may (or may not, as the case may
be) want access to and are asking for compensation for access thereto. if
you don't agree with the compensation, you don't have to do the deal.

assuming an agent's clients are not intelligent enough to understand how
agency works and further assuming that the agent is misleading their
customers in this respect, i can see how it would be unethical from a
somewhat idealistic point of view (which i happen to share). however, i
posit that those two assumptions are rarely correct at the same time and are
definitely not correct in this case as the quote from their website
demonstrates.

i think this has gone sufficiently off-topic at this point (assuming it was
ever on-topic), so i'd like to request that replies be sent off-list.

-p

---
paul galynin