There are two speed options available at present:

Each speed has two data caps available; either a 200GB (100GB peak, 100GB off-peak) or a 1000GB (500GB peak, 500GB off-peak). Much like with ADSL and FTTC the off-peak download cap kicks in from 20:00 daily so is highly usable, and uploads are unmetered.

Sadly the foot print for FTTP is still very limited across the UK, and surprisingly a fair number of rural areas are the first to benefit from it as opposed to the obvious major towns and cities. Our broadband checker will provide you with confirmation of whether it is available or coming soon. If it is available it can be purchased through our website sign-up pages, or if you are an existing customer, an order can be placed through the control panel.

Much like with ADSL products, the speeds you achieve are ultimately dictated by the length and quality of your line. The speed you actually achieve may not be the full 80Mbps, however our checker will give you a good idea of what could be possible.

Customers who already use our up to 40Mbps products are eligible for a free upgrade to this service. To proceed, please contact our support teams who can advise you on the speeds you should be able to achieve and proceed to action the upgrade for you.

For those who have yet to experience or consider FTTC connections, they are capable of delivering speeds of upto 80Mbps downstream to your premises. The technology relies in replacing part of the copper phone circuit with fibre, which helps reduce the amount of copper cables involved, and thus the speeds delivered can be higher. For more information on this technology please click here, or to check to see if super fast fibre broadband is available in your area click here.

Unlike some registries we will not be offering the 1 year registration option just yet. Nominet have priced one year registrations at a higher rate than subsequent years, and we won’t be alone in not supporting this pricing differentiation. Hopefully they will bring the pricing in-line and we will add it as an option.

The telecom reseller is one of the newest platforms ICUK has developed, and it remains the fastest growing part of our business. In this blog entry we hope to explain why it is proving to be so popular and why it might in your business’ interest to adopt these solutions too.

What does it allow me to sell?

As a Telecom Reseller you firstly gain access to the same facilities that a Broadband Reseller – wholesale broadband, outbound SMS and fax to email solutions. In addition to this you also have the ability to offer telecom products which compliment them:

• PSTN, ISDN 2 and ISDN 30 wholesale line rental
• Carrier pre-select wholesale calls
• SIP Trunks (beta)

At ICUK we’re not simply giving you the ability to order these products, you can manage and bill them through our platform too. In simple terms here are some of the facilities our resellers benefit from:

• Customer management facility
• Facilities to design and edit your own line rental and call tariffs
• Fully itemised billing platform
• Sign-up pages allowing you to transfer lines and request new installations
• Diagnostic tools to help fix and raise faults
• Access to Openreach tools to help identity and quote for lines
• Calculators to provide instant phone bill comparisons
• Control panels to rebrand and provide your customers with

All the lines we supply are purchased through Openreach. For those unfamiliar with Openreach they are part of the BT Group, however they are independent of BT Retail who are the arm most customers will purchase from. Openreach was setup to allow other companies to access the BT network without the need to employ their own engineers or gain direct access to exchanges. The UK remains unique in the world as very few countries have an equivalent to Openreach, and by using them we are able to compete on a level playing field on price, product and service. As such our resellers can be confident that they are able to deliver a quality product across the country.

What makes our telecom reseller platform special?

To answer this you need to consider the alternatives to our platform. Typically there are two:

a) A lot of telecom resellers simply earn commissions for customers they recommend. The commissions tend either to be one-off payments, or small on-going payments with clauses which are linked to continued growth. The main downsides with this model are:

• As a reseller you don’t own the customers contract, and so the true worth to your business is limited.
• One-off payments are nice incentives, but unless you are bringing in regular new business the income can fluctuate.
• On-going commission models are few and far between. Where they do exist the contract often favours the telecom provider, so that should revenues fall your commission payments may stop.

What is clear with this model is that you don’t own the contract with the customer, and your ability to generate regular profits is linked to regular new sales.

b) The second option is to deal directly with Openreach and call carriers. In the long run, and with lots of lines and minutes, this will prove to be the most profitable. However, to get the most from this you do need volumes and you also need to spend considerable sums to maintain it. Here are some points to consider:

• To join Openreach your business will be subject to a credit check and a sizable deposit. Typically this deposit can be in the region of £20,000+. In the interest of fairness, ICUK does complete credit checks on your business and will request a deposit from you, however this is in the region of £400.
• You will need to select a carrier to route your CPS calls through. They too may require a deposit, and without any existing minutes, the rates you will be supplied initially may not be very competitive.
• A billing platform will be required to generate the itemised calls and line rental charges for your customers. A typical billing platform, to rent, will cost in the region of £300-400 per month. This figure will increase as your billing revenue increases.
• Lastly, you’ll need a platform to interact with Openreach’s WLR3 systems. Sadly they don’t provide an interface to place and manage your orders, so third party software developers have come up with various solutions interacting with the complex Openreach API. These solutions will cost around £300 per month rising to £1000+ depending on the number of lines you are looking after.

As you can see there is a fair amount of expense when the profits you are making from these services is going to be initially very limited, making telecoms a very hard market to enter, that is until we developed our solution!

So, to answer the question, what makes our telecom reseller platform special:

1) We don’t operate by paying our resellers commissions, so you’re not reliant on us sending you payments, and likewise we don’t need to apply minimum commitments from yourselves allowing you to sell as many or as few lines and calls as your business chooses to.

2) We developed our own telecom billing platform and tariff management so that resellers didn’t need to source their own solution, and nor do we need to pay external companies for the use of theirs which helps reduce costs. Ours may not have all the features of the more established paid for solutions, however for the majority of our resellers the platform does everything it needs to with ease. We do listen to our resellers and are continuing to evolve our platform, which is again one of the added benefits of not using an off-the-shelf system.

3) We already have an account with Openreach, and interact with their API, so again you don’t need to spend £10,000’s of pounds in deposits, and you don’t need third party control panels to place and manage orders – everything you need is provided within ours.

4) In an age where helping the environment is an important factor for businesses to be seen working towards, and for consumers in their approach to selecting suppliers, we have developed our platform around operating in a paperless fashion. Instead of printing off reams of itemised calls, customers can view their calls online through a control panel you can brand as your own. As well as being paperless, we have the added advantage over paper of being able to apply daily updates (ie you can view all the calls you made the previous day). In addition, we’re not restricted on space so we show all calls, and we have interactive graphical statistics to gain a better understanding of your costs.

5) To compliment our paperless activities we also supply a powerful call interrogation tool which allows customers and resellers to extract very detailed information from months of phone bills. Such a task could prove very tedious, if not impossible, using paper based call listings, yet with our tool it can complete it’s search in seconds.

6) We allow you access to our wholesale buying prices, and in doing so it makes all our resellers competitive from the word go without getting poor rates owing to limited existing minutes. This unique solution is only possible because we invoice you for 20% of the profits you make from the phone calls you charge out to your customers. The idea being is that we can earn a percentage of what you do, without making you uncompetitive, as the number of resellers and minutes increase, our combined buying power rises further. It’s a solution whereby everybody benefits from the growth of the platform.

How can my business profit from this platform?

Focusing on the two core areas of the Telecom Reseller, you can earn from:

a) Call charges – There are no limit to the number of tariffs a reseller can create, allowing you to either apply blanket rates to all your customers, or build specific models to meet your customers needs. Typically a reseller can expect to make a profit of about 35% without becoming uncompetitive, and there are some destinations, especially when dialling internationally, whereby a profit margin of 100%+ is possible when compared to BT’s standard rates.

All the calls made by customers are charged on a per second basis. There isn’t any facility to round calls to the nearest minute as a typical tactic some providers use. Instead we have geared the platform around being honest and transparent. Resellers do however have the option to apply call connection charges on a per destination and time basis (eg 1 pence connection charge for calls to UK Vodafone during weekends). These charges are highly profitable and one adopted throughout the industry.

b) Wholesale line rental – The margins available on the lines are always going to be limited compared to those available on the calls. A typical reseller either opts for a strategy of applying a 10% margin, or some even sell it at cost, knowing that they will make the greater from from the calls. Selling lines as well as the calls is a must to retain control of the customer and not allowing a line provider to remove your CPS, or promote a better solution.

A large proportion of our resellers are utilising the reseller platform from ICUK to compliment their core activities. For example, an IT support company, may choose to offer telecoms to their client knowing full well that they are not only able to offer a better cost effective price than the existing BT contract they have, they have an intricate knowledge of their setup to advise if they have the telecom infrastructure they require.

How do I bill my clients?

In order for you to avoid the commission based model, a reseller must invoice their clients directly. We make this process as simple as it can be using the ‘statements’ section of the control panel. Here you will find each customer listed along with confirmation of the wholesale cost of their calls, and the retail price in accordance with their tariff and calls. It is this figure you need to use to raise an invoice to the consumer for.

In terms of payment, a large proportion of resellers know their clients well, or already sell solutions to them. As such, payment mechanisms such as BACS or cheque work well. However, if you don’t know your client well, then you should investigate either getting a merchant account from a bank to accept credit / debit card payments, or a bureau service for Direct Debit (use a bureau instead of a bank directly as unless you have an established and profitable business you are likely to be declined for your own SUN / originator number).

It is ICUK’s intention to make this process simpler with a new billing platform scheduled for 2012. The planned development will provide automated invoicing solutions to resellers helping to cut down on the time it takes you to raise invoices to your clients. Subsequent development paths will inevitably lead to us considering payment gateway integration for greater levels of automation.

I don’t know enough about telecoms to sell it

A typical barrier to joining our telecom reseller platform is knowledge of the industry and products you are selling and supporting. For this reason we do provide, and encourage all new resellers to partake, free training sessions from our head offices in Purley, South London. Here we will guide you through the control panel in its entirety, show you how everything works including the Openreach tools that will help you quote for new business and support existing clients. This is open to all resellers and their staff as we rather you understand what you are selling and supporting as it will help you in the long run in winning new business.

Request Further Information

Prospective resellers are welcome to email or call us to request our wholesale pricing and PDF platform overview pack. You can also find additional information on our website – http://www.icukhosting.co.uk/reseller/reseller_telecom_cps.asp

1. 150+ new domain name extensions
2. Domain management usability enhancements
3. BT Wholesale major service outages and planned engineering
4. Nominet Reseller Support in Whois
5. SQL server has been upgraded to SQL 2008 R2
6. Auto Responder Improvements for email

150+ New Domain Extensions

See our separate blog post regarding these new TLD’s.

Domain Management Usability Enhancements

See our separate blog post about these new usability enhancements.

BT Wholesale MSO and PEW Visibility

The first of a number of planned improvements in this area focuses on allowing you to gain visibility of Major Service Outages (MSO) and Planned Engineering Works (PEW) via the Control Panel. All reported 21CN MSO and PEW works can be found within the ‘Number Tools’ section of the panel. Any reported outages will be listed here with confirmation of the customers which are affected (if blank, then none of your users are affected).

Likewise, if there are any known issues they will be reported if you edit an affected broadband connection at the top of the page. This should help you if you are in the initial stages of trying to understand why a connection may be down.

We have ensured that you receive the same level of information that we do direct from BT Wholesale. We hope to elaborate on this facility to ensure that our Control Panel reactively notifies you of any known or planned issues.

At present we do not have any similar feeds from Cable & Wireless, so this is limited to BT Wholesale 21CN only. A 20CN feed will be included by June.

Nominet Reseller Support in Whois

Nominet, the body who looks after .uk domain extensions, has recently introduced a new facility allowing us to associate your reseller details to the whois. This ensures that your customer can see that you are a managing agent for the domain name as well as ICUK.

This entry is optional, and if you would like to apply it then hover over ‘Domains’ and select ‘Nominet Reseller’. Here you can enter the details you would like to appear. This will be applied all existing, as well as new, domains you register with ICUK.

We hope that you and your customers will benefit from the increased association.

Microsoft SQL 2008 R2 Upgrades

We have recently upgraded our SQL cluster to run MS SQL 2008 R2. Previously it was operating with 2005. There was no downtime or disruption, with all existing databases kept in the format they were prior to the update.

All Microsoft SQL Databases come with unlimited space, are mirrored to a secondary cluster, with twice daily back ups placed into the user’s home directory for additional resilience. Microsoft SQL databases, unlike our MySQL shared service, can be accessed externally for those wishing to build applications locally, but host the core data in a secure and backed up environment.

Auto-Responder Improvements

We have made some changes to the auto-responder email facilities to allow you to setup:

• Auto responders can now be set on a recurring basis. For example, if you are out of the office every Tuesday, the panel will allow you to configure an auto responder accordingly without doing so multiple times.
• Set a removal date and time ensuring you don’t have to remember to remove it.
• Webmail allows you to also manage these features, ensuring that end users, who may not necessarily have access to a Control Panel, can setup and manage this facility.

www.icukhosting.co.uk/domain-names/wales-domain-names.asp

We know that we have a fair number of Welsh clients and reseller who have an interest in this extension becoming a reality. ICUK will ensure that all the latest updates and timescales associated with the application are shown on this page to keep you informed of its progress.

Usability Enhancements

Here is a summary of some of the changes made:

1. New domain name availability checker with tabs to separate the various types of domains
2. Availability checker within the control panel now features shopping basket style features allowing you to store multiple domains from multiple searches
3.  The page which lists a clients domains is now provided with multiple tabs separating the types of domains. This allows you to see the status of domains at a glance including those which have expired, are set to expire within the next month, expiring within the next 2 months, and those domains which aren’t held with ICUK.
4. All aspects of the domain name management have been revamped to make them easier to understand and correct issues where confusion has existed before (eg Glue Records).
5. Registering new domain names has been made simpler. For example, when selecting existing contacts, the fields are pre-filled for you to review and amend.
6. The domain registration process now asks for any additional information as part of the sign-up form. For example, you can immediately request to opt-out of the whois with a Nominet domain registration.
7. Domain names which support multi-year registrations now offer you the ability to select the length at the point of ordering.
8. All-new error checking has been put in place to provide detailed answers to any problems which may arise.

150+ New Domain Extensions

The most exciting release we have surrounds the significant increase in domain name extensions we now support. We have contracts in place to transfer in existing domains as well as provide new registrations. The vast majority of the domain extensions have similar rules to those of a .com in as much as they can be registered for multiple years, and have no restrictions on who can register them. However, for a definitive answer on the rules associated with each of these new domains, we have provided an ‘info’ option beside the domain name in our availability search. Here we will state if there are any known requirements you must meet in terms of location, DNS or profession.

Some of the more popular new extensions include:

• India: .in
• Poland: .pl
• Japan: .jp
• Italy: .it
• New Zealand: .co.nz
• Isle of Man: .im
• South Africa: .co.za
• Malaysia: .my
• Peru: .pe
• Tonga: .to
• Israel: .il
• Korea: .kr

Pricing details for individual customers are confirmed on our website. We do provide discounts as standard to our reseller channel, and bulk discounts are available on request.

More to Come in 2012

It is our intention to double the domain extensions we offer by July 2012 with additional country extensions as well as full integration with Centralnic for domains such as .uk.com. Further details will be announced in due course.

Website Designers

Web designers and development companies have much to gain by adding hosting to their portfolio. As a designer you have a unique and trusted link with clients and their websites. How many times have you been asked for a recommendation of where to host, only to pass the business to the host you have used for other projects? If you can imagine such a scenario then you are wasting opportunities to add margin, and ensure you have a link to maintain a working relationship with the client beyond the initial project. For example, after a years hosting has passed, you have a great chance to make contact regarding its renewal, and at the same time gauge feedback from the client about the sites performance. This can easily lead to future development opportunities for you. Another way to view hosting, would be to ‘bundle’ it with your design / development work to present added value to the client.

A common misconseption by designers lay with the amount of support required; the reality is that hosting is very low in support costs especially as ICUK will take care of all of the server and network maintenance, as well as security planning. Likewise, our customer control panel allows your clients to login and make changes to their email, for example. The panel uses a powerful HTML template allowing you to put your skills to good use to brand it mimicing your site with your own colour scheme, styles, images and feel – you certainly won’t look like your average reseller!

IT Support Companies

In a similar way to a web designer, you are in a position of trust, where your client looks to you to support their IT needs. As a reseller you can provide hosting with confidence not only for delivering space for their site on the two main platforms, Windows and Linux, but professional email services on a clustered environment with regular off-site backups captured every 3 hours. What’s more, *you* are in control of it all from setting passwords, accessing the data, making alterations to the DNS and email management. In addition to the standard hosting facilities, there are also a wave of additional services, each with high margin capabilities, some of which you may already be outsourcing or using inferior solutions to what we can help improve. Spam and virus filtering, for example, may already be in place using third party software installed on an Exchange server, or using a third party such as MessageLabs. Our External Spam and Virus filter not only helps reduce loads on an in-house server, it helps queue mail in the event of server or connectivity failure for upto 7 days. Unlike some of our competitors, it operates on a per domain basis, not on a per mailbox license, saving potentially hundreds of pounds per year. As a reseller this only costs £30+VAT per year, regardless of the number of email addresses it scans for.

Pricing & Specifications

As a reseller you are free to set your own limitations (eg the number of mailboxes, disk space and data transfer that a client can consume). This presents you with an opportunity to setup tiers (Bronze, Silver, Gold) and assign a product that meets your customers needs. By applying limits you present upgrade paths to your clients as their needs change, which increases your profitability, after all it doesn’t cost you any more regardless of what is set. Hosts that provide unlimited resources for £x per year really limit their future profitability, and likewise they run the risk of attracting clients who will do their level best to consume as many of your resources as possible with little chance for you to generate enough revenue to continue adding resource.

As well as setting the specification, you can pick the price you charge. It’s up to you whether you wish to keep the prices low and invoice on a monthly or quarterly basis, or charge a fixed annual fee… or if you are bundling this with other services you could even opt to provide the service for free.

Too Good To Be True?

Another common query we have from resellers is how we allow resellers to setup unlimited hosting accounts for a fixed monthly fee. We can do so, because we have the resources and business model that can support this. We know full well that the majority of sites that are housed are less than 10MB in size, and we also know that hard drive sizes are ever increasingly. Likewise our available bandwidth to each server has steadily increased from 10Mbit about 5 years ago, to 100Mbit and now Gigabit connections are available to the majority of our shared hosting platform servers. Everything that ICUK offers is sustainable whether that be in the resources to support the sites, mailboxes, or in the level of phone and email support resellers benefit from. You can be rest assured that ICUK is committed to delivering high quality hosting and email services, and despite us also selling broadband and telecom facilities, hosting remains our core product and strength.

Interested?

If you would like to join ICUK as a reseller, whether it be for our basic broadband reseller, telecoms or hosting solutions, then please call or email with your queries.