TeleGeography recently had the pleasure of designing a platform for carriers to access data on the state of the market and benchmark it against their own. The result? i3forum Insights—a brand new market database to track and analyze international voice services.
Today we're answering a few quick questions about how this database works and how other carriers can reap the benefits.
Gather 'round, voice data enthusiasts. There's a new database in town.
i3forum Insights is a powerful resource designed for wholesale voice market analysis and performance tracking. It was created by carriers for carriers—and we're proud to say that it's powered by TeleGeography. Today we're giving readers a look inside this new tool and a preview of what early adopters are saying.
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.
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.
As a TeleGeography reader, it’s likely that you’ve seen the name i3forum before.
This unique consortium is bringing together carriers to take on industry-wide challenges. IoT? PBX Security? NFV? They’ve thought about how all of these topics are impacting the modern carrier.
A Senior Vice President at Tata Communications and i3forum Vice Chair Christian Michaud kindly took the time to give us an inside look at the way i3forum does business and what new challenges are on the horizon.
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