When it comes to the Middle East, there's much to consider.
What impact will the 5G revolution have on business in the Middle East? As global capacity grows, how can the region capitalize? Are interconnection fees the key to attracting new cables?
Our team is on top of it.
We often think that growth is a good thing—that it's healthy for an industry.
But it's possible that it happens so fast that it could become a problem.
This is the scenario Tim Stronge laid out for PTC 2020 attendees as he answered the question: how much growth is too much?
Some classic matchups in this month's list of interesting telecom stories.
We have Bharti Airtel taking on Reliance Jio.
We have Huawei making 5G progress in Germany and India despite new U.S. efforts to keep the Chinese company on the bench.
We've got drama. We've got intrigue. We've got new perspectives on satellite megaconstellations.
Keep scrolling to see what the TeleGeography staff is reading this month.
SD-WAN is still the hot topic among network professionals, but questions remain on how best to implement it. There is more work to be done.
December 2019 marked the tenth anniversary of the world’s first commercial LTE network launch. Scandinavian telco Telia paved the way in Stockholm and Oslo way back in 2009.
As for the decade that followed? Let’s take a closer look.
It's a new year, which means we've refreshed the data in our TeleGeography Report and Database.
If you're new to the voice industry–or just looking to refresh your knowledge—you've come to the right place. Before you peruse our new voice data and analysis, our expert team has collected a handful of terms and definitions to get you up to speed.
French billionaire Xavier Niel rose to prominence in the telecom world for his ownership of domestic telco Iliad. You might know Iliad for sparking a price war in the mobile sector when Iliad’s Free Mobile launched in January 2012. (Niel employed a similar price-war tactic when Iliad Italia launched in May 2018.)
But these companies only represent the tip of the iceberg.
Indeed, the size and scale of Niel’s empire are often overlooked due to convoluted shareholder structures and the lack of a unified brand name across markets.
Today we piece it all together to appreciate the bigger picture.
Many retail service providers, such as mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers, rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls.
Wholesale carriers terminated approximately 327 billion minutes of traffic in 2018, down 3% from 2017. While wholesale traffic declined in 2018, over the last 10 years it has seen a compounded annual growth rate of 3%.
Until 2015, international carrier voice traffic had increased in each of the previous 60 years.
But for the past four years, paid call volumes have slumped with no end in sight. International carriers had already suffered from revenue stagnation due to slow traffic growth and falling prices. The unprecedented occasion of outright traffic decline, however, marked a new and depressing turning point.
The international voice market doesn't bring a lot of joy these days. (For that, may I suggest adopting a puppy?)
As we've written before, 2015 marked a turning point in the international voice market. It was the first time since the Great Depression that international call traffic declined, even if only by one half percent.
And it's been downhill ever since, as the slump in voice traffic has turned into a fact of life. Carriers’ traffic fell a further 9% in 2017 and then another 4% in 2018, to a total of 465 billion minutes.
