Wholesale Poised for More Growth?

Business end users have, for as long as I can remember, had the ability to create their own voice services as an application. We call that a phone system. What's new these days is that there are more ways enterprises of all sorts can create their own voice services. And some of those same mechanisms can be used by consumers as well. Click to talk from a web site is one example. Instant messaging integrated with Session Initiation Protocol is another example. Voice-enabled gaming is another good example.

My assumption is that calling remains most useful when any telephone number can be called, without the constraints of who is in one's community or directory, uses a compatible client or device. And that means there is a growing business for wholesale providers of voice capabilities including, but not limited to, termination services. Which leads one to wonder whether the wholesale portion of industry revenues might be poised for even more growth. How could it be otherwise?

And might that be the case even though sales of traditional products appear to be falling? At least that's what The Yankee Group suggests is happening. The problem with tracking wholesale revenues is that the category tends to include all sorts of things. Access fees paid for termination provide a good example. What is difficult to capture are wholesale sales of services to retail providers of wireless, wireline termination and orgination, whether those entities are service or application providers or large enterprises that repackage voice termination as a feature.

That especially is true when an application provider basically needs to buy only dedicated Internet access or other bandwidth in order to make the voice application available to a wholesale customer. One wonders whether falling prices are not more than balanced by increased usage, even for legacy services, to say nothing of harder to measure IP-based wholesale.