A few weeks ago, I had
the pleasure of moderating a roundtable on ‘The Future of International Wholesale’
at the Carriers World conference in London. This subject is obviously on many wholesalers’
minds at the moment, as there were not nearly enough chairs around the table to
accommodate all the people who wanted to participate in this discussion.
In my opinion, a growing
number of wholesalers are going through what we could call a ‘mid-life crisis’
and are reviewing their future as pure wholesalers and the legitimacy of focusing
solely on voice services in the evolving International telecom ecosystem. The
main triggers of this thought process being the power shift created by global
mobile groups entering the wholesale market and serving their own community,
coupled with the move to everything IP, data, wireless and free!
From the discussions that
took place around the table, two things are clear in the minds of wholesalers:
There will always be a role to play for wholesalers who play their cards right
and in the long run, data and IP is the way to go.
There will always be a
place for pure wholesalers, as long as they can remain relevant to service
providers by enabling innovation, by providing high quality, secure global
reach and by working closely with their customers to help them monetize data
and new applications.
However, voice
wholesalers will not be as lucky in the long run, as everything is evolving to
IP, and eventually will become indistinguishable from data. At present, it is
clear that voice calls are being transported as data across many wholesale
networks, but they are still understood to be voice calls and charged as such.
The migration of mobile networks to VoLTE completes this move right from the
handset, and some of the complexities (and opportunities) of VoLTE will finally
start to undermine this service understanding. When a voice call moves mid-stream
to a video connection, how should that be charged?
Ultimately, voice will
become as sub-set of IP services, perhaps not even understood by the networks
in the middle as even forming part of a voice call and from there, the whole
structure of the wholesale service offering will be transformed. With the
advent of IPX and multiple services on a single pipe, mobile operators will
expect their carriers to support all their services going forward, in addition
to offering value added services such as number portability, fraud management
and real time intelligence to name only a few.
The ones that will be
able to meet these challenges and re-invent themselves into the new breed of
super wholesalers will win big, while the others will probably survive for a
while, but will eventually disappear.
So the $1,000,000
question is: What will the new world order look like?
In my opinion, consolidation
is around the corner and the wholesale world as we know it today will not exist
in 10 years’ time. The new world order will comprise of large mobile groups
supporting their op-cos’ needs through their own wholesale arm, supplemented by
a handful of global wholesalers able to provide extensive, scalable reach and
leading edge services. In addition, we will probably find a number of niche
wholesalers focused in meeting the needs of specific groups of customers (application
providers, content providers and media companies for example), or offering deep
in-region capillarity, or perhaps supporting specialized services for other
wholesalers.
So let’s get ready to
enjoy the ride, as it will be an exciting on!
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