A few weeks ago I attended International Telecoms Week (ITW), an annual gathering of the global wholesale telecommunications community. This is definitely a show in transition since its core customer base, telecom wholesalers, are stressed out.  That is, voice wholesale minutes are now intensely competitive—and even potentially declining—due to a slowdown in growth. As a result, voice wholesalers are trying to figure out how to address this issue in order to continue thriving.  As I suspected, IPX (specifically VoIPX) was a big topic of conversation.

Why? For one thing, evolving voice services to cover VoLTE roaming and the conversion of HD voice codecs is an efficient way to usher the wholesale community towards additional revenue streams. Additionally, I had quite a few conversations about WebRTC for the same reasons; WebRTC utilizes different voice codecs, so being able to bring WebRTC minutes to wholesalers is important in order to keep relevant with all types of traffic.  And for the same reason, I had conversations relating to video—specifically, ViLTE (Video over LTE in this instance) and WebRTC also contain video minutes.  All of these can increase minute exchanges.

WebRTC also opens up other customer segments into the OTT voice community. A lot of social media apps, for example, enable voice services to act as an optional way to communicate.  Making deals and garnering minutes from large social media voice services is an optimal way to extend revenue opportunities.

The quest to remain relevant is critical for wholesaler survival. In response, Dialogic is extending its products in order to assist this community with branching out. Dialogic has also worked with Hot Telecom to develop a whitepaper titled, “The Path towards IPX Innovation.” This paper outlines four key paths for wholesalers to take in order to grow: segment evolution, interoperability services, voice evolution services and value added service.

Please download the paper to read more about this in-depth.