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Wholesale Voice Carrier Market: Top Trends Propelling the Industry Demand through 2026

voice carrier

Wholesale Voice Carrier Market: Top Trends Propelling the Industry Demand through 2026

According to a recent study from market research firm Graphical Research, the global wholesale voice carrier market size is poised to expand at substantial CAGR during the forecast period. Thanks to the growing indispensability of smartphones worldwide, the global wholesale voice carrier industry outlook is expected to benefit from the massive voice over internet protocol (VoIP) demand. The market is expected to make a significant headway between 2020 and 2026 on account of the trending commercialization of 5G technology worldwide.

Due to the augmenting adoption of smartphones, VoIP traffic is growing. The utilization of mobile internet and data-intensive voice calling applications are responsible for the rising VoIP needs. As investments pour in across the global telecom industry, expansion of telecom infrastructure and networks is likely to foster opportunities for the global wholesale voice carrier market forecast.

CenturyLink, IDT Corporation, Vodafone Group Plc., Orange SA, Telefonica SA, Deutsche Telekom AG, BT Group Plc, Bharti Airtel Ltd., Sprint (T-Mobile), BCE Nexxia Corporation, and Alepo are some leading wholesale voice carrier companies in the international landscape. The following seven trends are accelerating the industry forecast:

Leased network demand in North America

The deployment of leased network infrastructure is growing across North America. In the highly competitive telecom industry, tier-2 and tier-3 providers have been leasing network capacities to a considerable extent from tier-1 operators. They have been doing so to benefit from the minimal cost of ownership to maximize profitability.

North America wholesale voice carrier market share from the leased network segment is anticipated to grow at a 10% CAGR up to 2026. The growth can be accredited to the growing need for a leased network in VoIP call termination in the region. Prominent telecom operators are leasing a part of their network for setting up voice termination facilities across emerging markets.

Transmission switching technology in North America

The wholesale voice carrier industry share from the transmission switching segment accounted for more than 50% of the total North American market during 2020 and is slated to expand further. The considerable dependence on traditional voice calls in the lesser developed North American regions is driving demand for the technology.

Rural areas face the challenge of limited wireless network availability. Since a large percentage of the rural population relies on traditional voice calls, the use of transmission switching is likely to expand through 2026. Several wholesale voice providers are offering minimal cost and time of installation, optimal life of switch, and unitized configurations.

Strategic partnerships by Canadian telecom enterprises

Canada’s wholesale voice carrier market size is expanding at a rapid pace, thanks to the growing 5G commercialization across the region. Canadian telecom operators are making the most of the partnership opportunities for delivering 5G services. They are focusing on diversifying their offerings through their strategic moves.

For instance, Telus Corporation announced its plan to partner with Huawei for launching a 5G network in Canada in February 2020. In compliance with the regulatory government standards, the partnership was fruitful in launching new, efficient solutions and devices. Thanks to the access to high-speed internet, enterprises can leverage IP-based telephony services.

Adoption of interconnect billing solutions in Asia Pacific

Interconnect billing solutions are gaining traction throughout Asia Pacific. The key reason these solutions are becoming mainstream is that telecom operators find convergent billing systems useful in accelerating digital transformation. The APAC industry share from the interconnect billing segment is slated to grow at a 10% CAGR through the assessment timeline. By 2026, the total APAC wholesale voice carrier market size is expected to surpass $7 billion.

Increasing telecom frauds in Asia

The alarming rise in fraud frequency across the regional telecom sector is influencing Asia Pacific wholesale voice carrier market. The requirement for fraud management solutions is growing due to this trend. As per the 2019 data published by Trend Micro, a Japan-based cybersecurity firm, the annual cost from telecommunications subscription frauds was estimated at $12 billion, equaling between 3% and 10% of the gross revenues of regional operators.

Asia Pacific wholesale voice carrier industry share from the fraud management segment is expected to rise at a 12% CAGR through 2026, promoted by the surging focus toward fraud prevention. In order to ensure a reduction in losses, the significance of these solutions is gaining popularity.

Growing subscriptions for VoIP services in Europe

The number of VoIP subscriptions are augmenting across European countries. The preference for VoIP-based calling is growing amongst regional subscribers due to the tendency to avoid the higher costs associated with traditional voice calls.

The industry share from the VoIP segment in the region will register around 13% CAGR through the next five years. VoIP-enabled wholesale voice carrier services provide enhanced technologies to telecom companies, simultaneously eliminating the unnecessary charges associated with roaming.

The gradual shift to voice termination in Europe

Europe wholesale voice carrier market size is slated to reach $11 billion by 2026, thanks to the presence of a robust commercial network infrastructure in the region. Since voice termination involves substantial routing costs and international call termination across multiple networks, wholesale voice providers can benefit from significant opportunities provided by this solution.

The region is seeing a shift from conventional voice and data services to more profitable and efficient solutions provided by regional wholesale voice termination service providers. Europe wholesale voice carrier market share from voice termination segment is expected to represent more than 70% of the total industry by 2026.

global manufacturing

The Importance of Connectivity in a Global Manufacturing Footprint

While the Internet of Things (IoT) has taken our homes by storm with smart lightbulbs, HVAC systems, TVs, and beyond – the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) are bringing a new wave of innovation to the manufacturing floor.

IIoT and CPSs provide your enterprise with the ability to network together multiple machines, sensors, instruments, and other devices across your global footprint and gain valuable insights to improve your manufacturing operations. CPS technologies are essentially an ecosystem of IIoT devices and can exchange data and control actions within the ecosystem.

While the IIoT and CSP evolution in modern manufacturing are exciting, it would not be possible, or safe for that matter, without a reliable, scalable, and secure network connectivity backbone. Here we will discuss the importance of connectivity to your global manufacturing footprint.

Connectivity: What’s the point?

Whether you work at an utterly tech-enabled manufacturing enterprise or one that solely relies on connectivity for communications, your connectivity is mission-critical in 2021. As the world economy progresses, more and more of your operations are moving online.

Your customers, employees, stakeholders, and managers require data integrity, security, transparency, and availability. Simple accounts payable or customer invoice processing can no longer be managed through a filing cabinet paper trail. Furthermore, preventative maintenance and other manual industrial processes can no longer afford to be handled in an offline and ad hoc manner. The best enterprises in 2021 will use IIoT and CPS to manage the shift from preventative maintenance to predictive maintenance schedules. This means that they will use AI and IoT to predict when conveyor belts will need replacement rather than guessing the wear over time.

Whether you are simply processing customer invoices or implementing exciting new manufacturing technology, your reliance on network connectivity keeps increasing every day with each megabyte of data your enterprise produces.

Choosing the Right Connectivity Solution

The right connectivity solution for a successful global manufacturing footprint will have two key attributes: capability and reliability. If your wide area network (WAN) and every local area network (LAN) has these attributes in place, you can be confident that your global manufacturing footprint is connected for success.

Capability

Your network needs to have the capability to meet the needs of your global manufacturing footprint. In networking terms, capability refers to bandwidth.

Bandwidth is the maximum amount of data that your connection can handle at any moment and is measured as megabits per second Mbps. If you’re running a global footprint with high data needs, yours is likely measured in Gbps – gigabytes per second.

Suppose you’re on a voice-over internet protocol (VOIP) phone call at your manufacturing plant and the quality of your call degrades when an engineer uploads a large 3D-CAD design to your servers. In that case, it’s likely that your network does not have adequate bandwidth to support your enterprise’s needs.

As you’d expect, the higher bandwidth your network has, the higher the cost likely is. It’s essential to make an educated estimate of your bandwidth requirements to ensure your business can function without overpaying for bandwidth you don’t need. Thankfully, there are online guides to help you do just that.

Reliability

A reliable network offers adequate speeds, minimal packet loss and jitter, limited to no unexpected downtime, and maximum security.

Low latency and minimal packet loss/jitter are required to run a smooth global manufacturing operation, impacting everything from simple email communications to production schedules. Latency is the technical term for the speed or rate at data moves across your network. Packet loss and jitter, which refer to when data is lost or mixed up in transfer, also impact your network reliability.

Internet outages and network downtime are expensive in more ways than one. Suppose your facility has payables due or orders to be shipped but is unable to communicate with the required constituents. In that case, network downtime can be detrimental to your performance and your enterprises’ reputation. One way to avoid downtime is with an adequately redundant network backbone that ensures that if your internet connection drops out, every one of your locations and customers can still function and access your services. Failover is the method of switching between your primary and secondary connectivity systems.

Luckily, many providers offer service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure a specific level of network reliability regarding latency, packet loss, jitter, and network uptime/failover processes. Be sure to read the fine print of your SLA before signing up for connectivity services.

However, given the prevalence of malware and network intrusions, most SLAs explicitly does not cover network security. It’s up to your IT team to ensure that your network is adequately protected from cyber threats using firewalls, encryption, and security protocol.

What’s Next

If reading this prompts you to question the capability and reliability of your enterprises’ connectivity, it might be time for you to reassess your network architecture and providers.

But as a global manufacturing enterprise, your time and resources should be focused on your core competencies, not your Internet connection. There are plenty of telecom agents, managed service providers, and IT consultancies who are eager to help out if your IT team is not fully equipped to find the best solution for your enterprise.

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Ginger Woolridge is the Head of Growth at Lightyear, a web platform that helps businesses comparison shop for network services (dedicated internet access, WAN solutions, VoIP, managed services, etc.). Ginger is based in NYC.

censorship

INTERNET CENSORSHIP IN CHINA IMPACTS GLOBAL TRADE

Unfree Speech

Online censorship can take many forms. With over four billion global Internet users in 2019, the lines around how we express ourselves online are being drawn and redrawn around the world.

In Europe, democratic governments are considering bans on so-called fake news and fines on social media companies that fail to delete “harmful” content. In the United States, tech companies are under fire for under- or overdoing their monitoring and expunging of material on their platforms that may be “extremist,” “hateful,” or merely repugnant or wrong-headed to some. Although free and open speech is fundamental to any democracy, U.S. culture is growing ever more hostile to dissenting opinions or genuine debate. The “cancel culture” is a harmful form of societal censorship.

When it comes to systemic state-sponsored censorship, North Korea, China, Russia, and Iran impose the harshest restrictions on Internet use by citizens and companies. Censorship is a tool of state control over the populace in those countries.

In China, political dissent or criticism of the Chinese Communist Party is punished, independent bloggers silenced, credentialed journalists from international publications denied access, and scholars made to fall in line with party views. But it isn’t only political speech that is banned or filtered. China maintains a system of surveillance and blocking technologies that comprise the “Great Firewall” between its citizens and many of the world’s largest commercial websites. The Senate recently held a hearing to discuss censorship of foreign companies in China as well as the government’s use of market power to extend the reach of censorship beyond its borders.

Firewalls and Filters

China’s State Internet Information Office appears to spearhead the monitoring and filtering of Internet traffic into and within China, but the endeavor is so extensive that as many as twelve other agencies comprise China’s censorship apparatus. The government exercises control over information technology infrastructure and deploys sophisticated software to scrub, deflect or block content and sites it deems illegal. China’s telecommunications companies, including China Telecom, China Unicom and China Mobile are enlisted to carry out and enforce state censorship measures, as are Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, China’s main Internet platforms. Controlling much of the allowable content in China, these companies maintain strict filters – censoring themselves and their users – to comply with government requirements.

China ISPs enlisted

Content deemed illegal is required to be removed or sites are blocked altogether. The U.S. Trade Representative’s 2019 Report to Congress on China’s WTO Compliance cites industry calculations that “China currently blocks more than 10,000 sites, affecting billions of dollars in business, including communications, networking, app stores, news, and other sites.” Blocked sites include Dropbox, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google search and Gmail, and foreign news services such as The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. Services required for day-to-day business operations such as cloud storage are restricted to service portals approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, not privately-owned or controlled channels where the government could lose visibility and access to the data transmitted.

As a second line of defense, the Chinese government prohibits or strictly licenses wholly- or partially owned foreign firms seeking to provide value-added telecommunications services such as Internet-based calls, videoconferencing services, online search and data processing, or virtual private network (VPN) services.

Corporate Choices and the Cost of Censorship

In 2010, Google famously defied the Chinese government’s requirements to filter the content returned by its search algorithm. When Google redirected its users to its uncensored Hong Kong site, the Chinese government blocked it. Taking it a step further, the government throttled Google’s services, degrading them to the point where users become inclined to abandon the service, causing Google to lose substantial market share and withdraw from China. Washington DC-based think tank Information Technologies and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimates Google lost $32.5 billion in potential search revenue from 2013 to 2019. Eventually, Google began developing Dragonfly, a search engine designed to comply with China’s censorship requirements.

Other U.S. companies have contorted themselves to avoid censorship. U.S.-headquartered Marriott International apologized for listing Taiwan as a separate country after Chinese authorities shut down its website. International airlines fell in line too, changing their websites to refer to Taiwan as part of China under threat they would be banned from operating in China.

The Chinese government is also becoming more brazen about leveraging its market power to ensure foreign corporations and their employees avoid criticizing its policies outside of China. We are all familiar with the NBA’s backpedaling after initially supporting its employees’ right to exercise free speech in the United States in expressing support for Hong Kong. Increasingly, foreign firms will face a choice between protecting their right and the rights of their employees to freedom of expression or protecting their business dealings in China.

Foreign firms face choice rev

Not Just a China Problem

According to an analysis from Google, more than 40 governments now engage in broad-scale restrictions of online information, “a tenfold increase from just a decade ago.” Among the examples cited, YouTube has been blocked in Turkey. Several countries in Eastern Europe interfere with the popular blogging service, LiveJournal. Guatemala suppressed WordPress blogs during its 2009 political crisis. Iran stifles dissent by blocking social media platforms. Vietnam actively filters political content from social media.

Censorship Map revised

Do Global Trade Rules Address Censorship?

Within the trade community, voices are growing louder that China’s Internet controls constitute a barrier to market access and are therefore a violation of China’s global trade obligations.

Foreign companies and industry have argued that China’s censorship measures are not even-handed; they are applied to non-Chinese products or service providers selectively and in ways that are more restrictive than those applied to domestic providers. They point to examples of similar content that draws a permanent ban of a foreign site whereas the domestic site is merely required to remove specific content.

The Chinese government’s guidelines for permissible or illegal content are vague, unpublished and not transparent. The criteria for IP addresses, domains and website addresses that are permanently or routinely blocked are a state secret. Foreign companies operating in China or seeking to export to China have no way to understand the basis or seek redress for limitation on their access to the Chinese market.

Weakening foreign industry’s case, however, is their acknowledgement that the market access commitments many WTO members have undertaken may not apply to all Internet trade. In the WTO agreement on services, a member’s commitments to national treatment and market access apply only to services specifically listed by members in their schedules. When the agreement was negotiated, many of today’s value-added Internet services did not exist.

The WTO agreements covering trade in goods and services permit measures “necessary to protect public morals,” to maintain public order or to protect national security, with the limitation that those measures should not be applied in a manner that would constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or “a disguised restriction on international trade.” Legal experts debate whether a WTO suit against China’s censorship is winnable, and China experts are dubious whether China would comply regardless.

Trade Rules Cant Fight Censorship

Cyber Sovereignty or Cyber Superpower?

China’s policy footing is unabashedly oriented to exercise absolute control over access to Internet content and services within its own borders. Centrally, the Chinese Communist Party will thwart communication it perceives “subverts state power or undermines national unity.”

The question is, how far will the government go to exercise influence over international norms for cyber governance? And how much state support will be thrown behind freeing itself from dependence on foreign technologies and services to become a global cyber superpower? Is censorship being used to lock foreign competitors out of China’s market to protect local competitors? How far will China go to censor communication it perceives as a threat outside China?

The apps we use that are created by mainland Chinese companies likely contain code to scan and block prohibited websites or language the Chinese government finds objectionable. But beyond sanitizing content, the government may specifically target sites for censorship outside of China.

The Chinese government recently disabled a social media platform in Hong Kong that was used to organize anti-China protests. Its actions may portend a broader approach to Internet censorship in Hong Kong which, according to the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association is home to more than 100 data centers operated by local and International companies that transit over 80 percent of web traffic for mainland China.

The Nexus of Censorship and Trade

Government measures to disrupt Internet access or prevent the dissemination of information online are generally considered to infringe upon the basic human right to freedom of expression. Now, industry actors along with open Internet advocates are leading the charge to consider censorship antithetical to the global trading system. At the center of the debate is China, the country with the most extensive censorship program in the world and which holds significant market power in the global economy.

The implications of commercial censorship run the gamut, from stifling key sales channels for exporters to China, to limiting or prohibiting foreign companies from providing Internet services in China, to extraterritorial censorship of overseas Internet sites and services. At a recent hearing on censorship and trade, Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) stated, “The actions undertaken by China are clearly insidious and counter to the necessary conditions of a fair global economic system.” That may be so, but global trade rules and institutions as they exist today are inadequate to alter China’s approach or mitigate the global impacts of China’s censorship.

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Andrea Durkin is the Editor-in-Chief of TradeVistas and Founder of Sparkplug, LLC. Ms. Durkin previously served as a U.S. Government trade negotiator and has proudly taught international trade policy and negotiations for the last fifteen years as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service program.

This article originally appeared on TradeVistas.org. Republished with permission.

Why Businesses Must Grasp Millennial Thinking Or Face Economic Calamity

When it comes to shopping and buying, the Millennial generation appears to play by its own rules.

And businesses that fail to understand the Millennial mindset are destined to fall behind their competition – and perhaps plummet into irrelevancy, says Gui Costin (www.guicostin.com), an entrepreneur, consultant and author of Millennials Are Not Aliens.

“Millennials are changing how we buy, how we sell, how we vacation, how we invest, and just about everything else,” Costin says. “If you’re running a business, you have to pay attention to how they think and act.”

Millennials are the generation born roughly from 1981 to 1995, meaning that the older millennials aren’t that far from 40. There are about 80 million Millennials, or nearly one-third of the adult population in the U.S. – and that’s a lot of buying power.

Millennials grew up under very different circumstances than Baby Boomers and Generation X, though, and the way in which they came of age greatly influenced them.

One example is their relationship with technology.

“All of us, regardless of which generation we belong to, have been impacted by technology,” Costin says. “But the generation most affected by the digital, connected world are the Millennials. You could think of it this way: If technology were a geyser, Baby Boomers and Generation Xers have been sprayed by its impact, but Millennials got drenched.”

And their natural use of technology transformed the way they act as consumers, Costin says.

“Bargaining is a part of their process,” he says. “Because they are facile with technology, they rely heavily on their cell phones to price shop and hunt the best deals.”

Costin says there’s plenty that businesses need to understand about Millennials, but here are just a few other facts about their consumer habits worth paying attention to:

They let everyone know about their buying experiences. It is not uncommon for Millennials to candidly share details about their buying experiences, good or bad, on their public social media platforms. “This can translate to bad news for businesses that underperform or, conversely, great news for those that exceed expectations,” Costin says.

Big purchases can happen virtually. For many older people, it’s difficult to even conceive the idea of buying a car, for example, without ever physically seeing or touching it first. “Millennials do it all the time,” Costin says. “In fact, they are the very first of all the generations to make a large purchase without first performing an on-site inspection.”

Brand loyalty means something. No matter how fickle many people believe Millennials to be, they are extremely brand loyal, Costin says. In fact, 60 percent of Millennials say they almost always stick to brands they currently purchase.

Information is essential. Millennials scour the internet to learn about a brand or product before making a purchase. They check websites, blogs, or peer reviews that they trust.

Instant gratification is paramount. Because they have grown up in a digital age, Millennials are used to speed and immediate gratification. “They value prompt feedback and communication and do not like wasting time,” Costin says. “Think emails, text messages, and online messaging.”

“The environment you grow up in determines what you become accustomed to,” Costin says. “Gen Xers and Baby Boomers need to realize that how they grew up is affecting the way they are selling and marketing their organizations. But you cannot sell and market to Millennials the same way you were sold and marketed to.

“The good news is, many companies are listening. They are actively replacing dated, manual processes with more efficient, cutting-edge tools to promote the convenience and speed Millennials crave.”

About Gui Costin

Gui Costin (www.guicostin.com), author of Millennials Are Not Aliens, is an entrepreneur, and founder of Dakota, a company that sells and markets institutional investment strategies. Dakota is also the creator of two software products: Draft, a database that contains a highly curated group of qualified institutional investors; and Stage, a content platform built for institutional due diligence analysts where they can learn an in-depth amount about a variety of investment strategies without having to initially talk to someone. Dakota’s mission is to level the playing field for boutique investment managers so they can compete with bigger, more well-resourced investment firms.