We are a retail carrier, do we really need an interconnect voice management system?

Of course you do! Well, let me rephrase that, any carrier that provides voice services as part of their normal product offering would be well served to implement a formal voice interconnect management system.  

Why do I think you would be well served? Because this stuff is hard and can really cause you problems. I know, I know, voice appears to be so ….what’s the word? ….Boring. Yes, that’s how everyone outside the industry, and even some inside the industry, choose to describe it. Of course, we here at GCS don’t think so. We actually think it’s exciting. We kind of get our “geek” on when we start discussing the industry and what we are trying to do with our platform.

See, voice may have the appearance of boring, but actually, it’s crazy complex, fast moving, dynamic, and very challenging. Yes, the cost of voice calls have come down ridiculously over the past 20 years. I remember back after the Telecommunications ACT of 1996 when we thought it was great that we could pay only $0.10 a minute to make a call from New York to California. Today, carriers typically charge each other around $0.002 per minute for that call. That’s a 98% decrease in absolute costs! So, if you offer a voice service then you better do it at the lowest total cost of operations/ownership you can achieve because for every $1M in top line revenue carriers were making 20 years ago, they are now making $20k. I don’t know about you, but that’s scary, terrible, and horrible news for the industry. But, I can’t describe that as boring.

So, efficiency, automation, speed, accuracy, scale, reliability, intelligence….all this is what is needed in a voice service providers back-office operations. And that can only happen through the employment of next generation OSS & BSS Solutions to encompass device, subscriber, service, and interconnect partner management. Whether you are a retailer, mobile, OTT, VNO, International, Domestic, CLEC, RBOC, Cable Co, consumer, business, all the above, in order to succeed in today’s hyper competitive and extremely challenging market you need to have the systems in place.  And if you are offering voice, you need to have an interconnect voice management system.