Neutrality is essential to the effective exchange of minutes

The Wholesale voice business depends on the ability to forge new connections with their peers, for the safe and secure exchange of minutes. They need to be able to find the optimum routes for their traffic, so that they can protect and grow margins, while serving their customers.

As such, carriers need to find open environments in which the creation of new relationships and access to new routes and partners can be achieved. Indeed, opinion within the industry is united on this. The problem is that neutrality is easy to say but not necessarily easy to achieve. There are often stakeholders with either an explicit or undeclared interest in the resulting agreements, which means that the principles of neutrality can be undermined.

This problem is made worse when parties innocently buy into the concept of neutrality, only to find that vested interests or preferences undermine the process. Wholesale voice operators need an open environment on which they can really depend, so that they can find the partners they need, on their own terms.

For example, if you see a surge in traffic to a destination that you currently serve, you want to check to see if you can get a better deal. Wholesale depends on often tight margins, so anything you can do to protect and grow these while delivering the required levels of service is essential.

Similarly, if you want to address a new market and seek a partner to enable you to reach new destinations, then you want to know that you can do so quickly and easily. What you don’t want is to be forced to continue with pricing that may not be advantageous or to be compelled to adopt a particular route. You need choices, flexibility and freedom to make the right decisions for your business.

That’s why true neutrality is an invaluable asset. It means that you can confidently build the partnerships that you need to make your business thrive. It’s about a truly open and functioning marketplace in which each stakeholder, while acting in their own interests, shares the same goal of neutrality.

Ultimately, wholesale voice should be a mutually sustaining business, based on symbiotic relationships. It’s at the heart of everything we do at Digitalk. It’s why we built Carrier Cloud on the principle of enabling a truly open environment, with neutrality as a core and unchanging principle.