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Not every business deal needs to have a winner and a loser. What’s important is that all participants in the relationship create new value for their businesses.

Telefonica has run a traditional market research tracker globally for many years. Every month it can report in detail on what its customers tell it about their level of satisfaction. Since 2012, its subsidiary O2 has taken this one step further, and compared what customers report with what they actually do, based on transaction and network data.

The amount of change that a telecoms operator’s business must undergo to support digital services is so massive that it’s often called a ‘transformation,’ and wholesale business models are no exception.

As data usage and advanced next generation services continue to grow dramatically in the marketplace, the role of the wholesale service provider has never been so vital and varied in its nature.

As Yemen becomes the latest Middle Eastern nation to become embroiled in civil war, efforts to advance the region’s telecoms infrastructure suffered another setback.

Among the tiny part of the population that actually knows what it is, net neutrality has tended to encourage polarised views (often about the same thing): for example it is either an essential feature of the internet to encourage startups, or an outmoded idea that holds back investment in innovation. It’s rare, however, for an institution to hold several positions at once, but that’s the state of the debate in Europe.

Billing and collections. It’s not exactly a consumer’s favourite part of their relationship with their telecoms provider, but it is of course necessary. Not approaching billing and collections in the right way can cause significant damage to the customer relationship, particularly if that customer has fallen into arrears.

By the very nature of wholesale, a carrier is serving its competition - competition that buys access when it brings customers to sites that the wholesaler’s network serves. However, an interesting analysis by Oppenheimer & Company’s Tim Horan offers a peek into a probable future with risks for the slow or unwary, and it started me thinking…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock these past few months, you will have probably heard about Google’s mobile update. Implemented on the 21st of April, this change in the search engine’s algorithms meant that a website’s “mobile-friendliness” would serve as an additional ranking signal. As a result, companies which failed to provide their customers with a mobile friendly website likely saw reductions in their traffic.

On our side of the pond, the FCC has added fuel to telecoms fires by upping the speed definition of broadband by greater than six fold, from 4Mbps to 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream.

Mobile phone data rates have accelerated over the last two decades from 50kbps in 2G GPRS to 100Mbps+ in 4G LTE. This has been driven by Moore’s Law – the doubling in circuit complexity every 2 years – which has enabled increasingly sophisticated digital modulation to be implemented in low-cost chips.

SS7 is a very sturdy protocol for mobile network signalling control. The layers are well-defined with exact procedures dealing with redundancy, robustness, alternate routing and load-sharing all designed in from the start. Noticeably absent from the specifications, however, is reference to security measures, perhaps signifying the size and level of trust amongst the MNO community when the SS7 protocol was introduced and developed over 40 years ago.