Many retail service providers—mobile operators, MVNOs, and cable broadband providers—rely heavily on wholesale carriers to transport and terminate their customers’ international calls.
With the recent update to the TeleGeography Report and Database, we know that wholesale carriers terminated approximately 363 billion minutes of traffic in 2016, down four percent from 2015.
According to our TeleGeography Report and Database, 2015 marked a turning point in the international voice market—the first time since the Great Depression that international call traffic declined, even if only by one half percent. However, the slump in voice traffic metastasized in 2016, as carriers’ traffic slumped 4.5 percent to 528 billion minutes.
CommsUpdate is TeleGeography’s free daily summary of the top global telecom stories. Born out of desk research for TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database Service, CommsUpdate is produced by TeleGeography’s team based in the historic city of Exeter in Devon, England.
To celebrate the 15th anniversary of CommsUpdate, we’ve put together a list of weird and wonderful facts about your favorite telecom newsletter.
In 2017 you told us that you wanted to read about content providers, SD-WAN, internet capacity growth, and the submarine cable boom. So we wrote about those things!
We also covered the cloud, connectivity trends, network pricing, and much more.
As the year winds down, we pulled 10 of our most popular posts to capture the year in telecom. See if your favorite stories made the cut below.
TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database includes comprehensive coverage of the world’s major telecoms markets—but we also profile some of the smallest principalities, republics, and territories in the world.
Here’s another peek at what’s happening in three unique island markets.
"From a booth set up in Grand Central Terminal, a person could talk to a friend in Chicago or Washington while also seeing them on a small video screen. The friend would also have to go to a special booth in those cities to take the call. The price for the novelty of a three-minute call was $16.
That would be equivalent to $121 in today’s money."
“I talked with one of your engineers nearly 20 years ago. He said something about waves. Said you needed something that would make the long-distance wires talk farther.”
That’s how our conversation begins between two men, one of them an engineer, in this 1940 film that looks back on AT&T’s first transcontinental phone line.
We recently wrote about the decline of international carrier traffic, which comes at the hands of “over-the-top” (OTT) communications services.
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