Everything Flows
The emerging cross-industry ‘ICTization’ changes competition within the wholesale business 2032
The need for cross-industry ICT solutions as aggregated service bundles opens up a whole new world of opportunities for telco operators to stretch out into new fields of business. Following this trend, the wholesale offering portfolio will change as well. There is a tendency towards Infrastructure offered as a Service (IaaS), with connectivity and Managed Services in the focus of wholesale companies of the future.
In 2032, all technical devices are part of an interconnected world where Machine to Machine (M2M) communication is a major pillar for both business and private use. The cornerstone of these developments is a future version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, allowing almost unlimited assignment of IP-addresses. This “ICTization” created by this Internet of Things opens up huge potentials for the network providers’ wholesale business besides traditional transport oriented business models. Interconnection and transit services still have an essential role in the overall connectivity of devices. The potentials, however, are in the fields of operating as a service integrator, wholebuying specialized ICT services and offering them as a refined Managed Services bundle. On this basis, four major holesale business models are established:
1. The connection of technical devices in the retail market requires wholesale access products on different access infrastructures like copper, fiber and cable as well as on all sorts of mobile networks like WiMAX, HSXPA, LTE and future standards.
2. Nomadic retail services combined with high bandwidth requirements demand seamless traffic handover between different access technologies. Thus, intelligent wholesale aggregation solutions are required to enable connectivity and high quality seamless data transport.
3. Networks in different regions are interconnected by worldwide operating backbone operators which provide quality differentiated data transport to enable high quality as well as best effort data interconnection between all kinds of different access and aggregation providers. These operators enable Managed Service providers to guarantee worldwide quality of service (QoS) while operating from a centralized location.
4. The enormous speed of technical evolution fosters the development of specialized Managed Services which are the most complex and most profitable high end products in the market fulfilling the end customers’ real demands. Their USP is the integration of innovative services along the ICT value chain like remote M2M machine maintenance, security, data processing and connectivity. This integrated full service bundle is sold to specialized retailers (e.g. automotive or health device manufacturers). Examples for Managed Services can be found in all areas of innovation:
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