Consumers are racing ahead with the adoption of new services, which could be good news for retail telecoms providers. But for the wholesale network operators underpinning the industry, new services without standards present a serious challenge.
"It’s really going to be difficult to make enough money on these services if there is no standardisation," said iBasis CEO Willem Offerhaus, speaking at the opening session of this year’s Carriers World event in London on Tuesday.
"We have different versions of VoLTE, we have different versions of RCS [and] we have many versions of LTE," Offerhaus said. "We are not able, with our current margins, to sustain our business if we’re not working in standardised environments…The implementation is just way too complex."
That lack of standardisation could also present an opportunity for wholesalers though.
"There is a place for the wholesale operator," said Nick Ford, president of carrier services at IDT Telecom.
He agreed with Offerhaus that more work needs to be done on VoLTE, for example. "The standards around it are very loose," he said.
The industry needs wholesale operators to help make networks and services interoperable, Ford said. There is an opportunity for wholesalers to "sit in the middle and make it work," because at the moment it is not clearly defined, he said.
Additional reporting by Nick Wood.
