Economic and social disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has irrevocably changed the telecom industry. Companies instituted work-from-home policies, customers relied more on online shopping, and everyone was obliged to stay at home and socially distance. Telecommunications stepped up and became the glue binding everyone and everything together.
As a result, the telecom industry is receiving more attention and appreciation from its customers. Though the pandemic has started to fade (hopefully), the acceleration of new technology and our reliance on connectivity will continue. Covid-19 has nudged us towards our digital future, and the networks are advancing to make it happen.
Now more than ever, the telecom industry is central to how society operates. Our sector is mission-critical to keep economies moving, and this is true in three ways. First, the telecom industry provides business-critical connectivity and resilience. Second, the telecom industry facilitates work-from-home arrangements. And third, the telecom industry keeps individuals and societies connected and informed, with access to medical, financial, commercial, and other essential services during mandated social isolation.
Wholesale carriers are no longer voice- and SMS-centric. We have seen immense growth in areas like Cloud services, machine learning, and IoT services that reflect the growth potential in the industry. As a result, digital is the way moving forward, and the wholesale industry is also moving in that direction.
Of course, this also means everything is going digital. Payments, offers, AI-driven personalization—every aspect of business, from the product itself to its implementation to the behind-the-scenes relationships are going digital. Wholesale carriers like Distributel are taking advantage of digitization to achieve long-term business growth.
However, during the past year we’ve seen that operators are focusing on evolving areas in the industry and are now getting along with wholesale voice carriers with extensive networks to help them compliment their existing value chain.
Thus, collaboration between operators and wholesale players is driving tech initiatives like blockchain and IoT. Moreover, wholesale players are diversifying their portfolio with Unified Communication, to add incremental revenue to smaller Operators Carrier Division Profit and Loss. It’s also important to remember that wholesale players are sharing information and preventative strategies to avoid telecom frauds in international voice and messaging.
The majority of the wholesale carrier industry will embrace platform-based business models to meet their customers’ evolving demands, similar to what Amazon or Uber are currently doing. That means that wholesale carriers who embrace digitalization in terms of how they interact with their customers will be the ones customers trust the most. APIs will become more commonplace within the wholesale communication industry, and they could be bundled with cyber security and AI-based routing and fraud alerts.
It’s clear to us that digital platforms are no longer supplementary; they are the default customer experience.