Collaboration, quality of service and security to drive wholesale telecoms innovations

During the Covid-19 pandemic, wholesale telecoms service providers have responded rapidly to new working patterns and the surge in demand for bandwidth. Simultaneously, they have continued to develop innovations to address the longer-term needs of their customers, partners, and customers’ customers: enterprises, households, and consumers.

Wholesale telecoms services play a critical role in managing and enhancing access and transport routes and other infrastructure that enables voice, data, and video traffic to move smoothly and securely from origination to destination between people, sites, countries, and regions. Because no single service provider has a truly global reach, a collaborative approach to moving traffic across networks from A to B is required. 

Trends such as the transition of enterprise workloads to cloud environments, the shift of progressively immersive experiences online, and proliferation of IoT devices are driving the need for high levels of reliability, latency, and security, as well as increased flexibility. Wholesale telecoms service providers have a great opportunity to help their customers to answer some of the technical and commercial challenges associated with these requirements, and in so doing differentiate their own offerings.

For the past 10 years, Omdia has been rating and ranking global wholesale telecoms innovations. Our Wholesale Innovation Analyzers for 2019 and 2020, which respectively shortlisted 13 and 10 leading innovations from over 300 announcements identified, have recently been released. 

These reveal several drivers and areas of opportunities for wholesale telecoms service providers.

• Collaboration is key. Over half of the 23 shortlisted innovations in 2019 and 2020 involved partnership between two or more companies. Cooperation brings different expertise and technologies, channels to market and insight into customer requirements.
• Quality of service will be a “must-have”. Connectivity needs to evolve from “best effort” to guaranteed levels of services to meet the requirements of application developers and enterprise customers. This opens up the opportunity for monetization based on technical or commercial service-level agreements rather than traditional parameters like usage or licensing.
• The security and fraud attack surface continues to expand. With their deep network expertise and visibility into traffic types and flows, wholesale telecoms providers are well positioned to help retail providers and their enterprise customers navigate this complex, moving target of risk.

Discover the full analysis in the Wholesale Innovation Analyzers for 2019 and 2020. These reports analyse rate and rank the leading innovations wholesale telecoms service providers have made across new services, go-to-market approaches, strategies, technologies, and business models. These reports are two of the market forecasts, reports, surveys, and market data insights that make up the Wholesale Telecoms Intelligence Service from Omdia. This service helps wholesale communications service providers identify growth markets and assess evolving customer needs. Click here to download the overview now.