What are the key challenges in the carrier market and how is The Sphere preparing to tackle them?
Fraud continues to be a major problem plaguing the global wholesale VoIP trade with both buyers and suppliers susceptible to significant losses from fraudulent activity. The Sphere tackles fraud issues through its neural network data analytics and machine learning algorithms, which enable live detection, alerting and active prevention of fraudulent and abusive traffic, while constantly learning and evolving to foresee new and unknown threat patterns as they appear. This new ecosystem protects operators, carriers, resellers and service providers from financial losses, commercial disputes and service blockage.
Lack of clear communication and access to all players is another issue The Sphere solves. The USA alone has over a thousand operators and carriers and with many more all over the world, and the telecom trade is becoming increasingly fragmented. There is a clear need for Routing Optimization that calculates and maintains how traffic flows in the best way, ensuring the best quality for the lowest possible cost.
The Sphere also manages discrepancy in quality standards and cost. Quality of Service (QoS) is a major issue in VoIP implementations. Since the market is so deregulated, there is no governance over the promised and delivered QoS by a supplier. With its artificial Intelligence system and advanced algorithms constantly evolving based on historical and real-time data within its network, The Sphere can identify issues in the ‘now’ and predict and recommend improvements that will prevent future quality deteriorations.
Another key telecom problem The Sphere solves concerns the lack of financial assurance capabilities. The Sphere’s patented blockchain routing and financial reconciliation technology ensures real time billing reconciliation, financial settlement and on-demand payment disbursements.
How has wholesale demand evolved in recent years and how is The Sphere aiming to meet those demands this year?
The global revenue made from telecom services is expected to reach over €1.2 trillion Euros in 2018. The Asia-Pacific region, with an estimated value of €373 billion Euros in 2015, is the fastest-growing telecommunications services market, followed by North America and Europe.
Telecommunications market size has increased in the past two decades, due to cheaper and innovative technologies. Rapid deregulation and innovation in the industry linked with tremendous demand for services worldwide, low market penetration barriers and quick financial turnover has caused a flood of new wholesale carriers to continuously enter the marketplace
The Sphere, with its propriety network architecture and technical solution, addresses the industry’s challenges in a way that has not been achieved before on this scale.
Which of the areas do wholesale operators need help to achieve faster ROI?
The situation in the wholesale market is that the margins are getting slim. So there is a need to have a very efficient network in order to take advantage of the current traffic capabilities. At the same time, the quality of the call cannot suffer because an operator wants to select a cheaper vendor. There are a lot of excess assets and call times that are misused because the systems to use them are increasingly complex. The opportunity in the market is to have more transparency, to be able to see the quality of the call that a vendor is providing, and on the other side, it is essential to control and verify the vendor’s action in terms of call termination and connectivity. There is a huge opportunity to achieve faster ROIs by using a system that will help tighten these leaks and loose ends.
The revenue for the telecom industry will keep growing in the years to come because of the ever rising need to be connected. The future holds immense opportunity, as the user base for communication devices will no longer be limited to humans; more and more devices will start self-connecting thanks to IoT.
What have been The Sphere’s key developments and stand outs over the past year?
Over the past year, our team has been developing The Sphere to be a platform that offers a solution to some of the major problems in the telecommunications industry. Along with that, we wanted to offer a platform that was intuitive, social, real-time and revolutionary. The Sphere is the platform that telecom operators never knew they needed.
The Sphere ecosystem is a global network, a commercial meeting point engineered to deliver an unparalleled business development and trading opportunity through the facilitation of unlimited multiparty chain-trading, routing and financial settlements in real time. It removes all borders and limitations, delivering each party the freedom through a single interconnection to instantly offer, purchase and transit any service in a financially secure yet dynamic environment.
The Sphere’s Bid-On-Live service enables sellers to instantly gain access to live traffic by matching real time QoS and rate benchmarks, while offering clients the opportunity to allocate a part of their live traffic to achieve the best rate/quality/capacity parameters the market can offer.
