The purpose of this CXTech Week 38 2023 newsletter is to highlight, with commentary, some of the news stories in CXTech this week. What is CXTech? The C stands for Connectivity, Communications, Collaboration, Conversation, Customer; X for Experience because that’s what matters; and Tech because the focus is enablers.
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Covered this week:
- Messaging Monopolies
- TADSummit Podcast Episode 4
- TADHack Prize Pot now $16.5K as Telesign joins running TADHack Belgrade
- Deutsche Telekom get your act together on programmable telecoms
- Theta Lake and RingCentral Partner
- People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Messaging Monopolies
Competition in programmable communications is being stifled by a growing number of monopolies, this is perverse. Urgent action is required, the bottom line is SMS spam is not being stopped and its earning #SMSspam Club $2.4B per year.
Go review your wireless bills today and look for “Call Filtering”, “Economic Adjustment Fee”, Call and or robo-call service fees.” most hover around $5-$10 per line, per month.
I read that if you add all the fluff fees up at an average of $5-10 per telephone number per month across the approx 300m subscribers in the USA that totals $1.5b-$3B per month.
Gathering all the information for this post was very difficult. Most brands, enterprises, UCaaS, CPaaS and CCaaS providers have no clue on all the monopolies that exist, even many of the SMS aggregators do not have the span of knowledge in this post.
I’ve published the TCR Trilogy, and through the Truth In Telecoms segment of the TADSummit podcast we’ve started to discuss a few of these issues facing innovators. It’s time for the industry to start commenting, discussing, and expressing your views on what is going on.
If I’m wrong, let me know. If you agree express your support for what is being uncovered here. Change is urgently required. The book-clubs have shown they’re not going to change the situation, only support the messaging monopolies through low-ball questions, if questioned at all.
I have to share this snippet from the comments, see Anthony’s 🙂
Check out other articles in this series:
Understanding TCR and Kaleyra Part 2
Understanding TCR and Kaleyra Part 1
The Campaign Registry and Foreign Ownership: A Matter of National Security
TADSummit Podcast Episode 4
TADSummit Innovators, we focus on TelecomsXchange and their CEO Ameed Jamous. TelecomsXchange is focused on programmable wholesale telecoms, standing on the shoulders of the open source telecom software giants. Ameed is a sponsor of TADSummit and has supported TADHack over the years. We’re both on the Mobile Ecosystem Forum panel “The Future is Cloudy: Cloudification of Wholesale Telecom” led by Isabelle Paradis of HotTelecom.
What Ameed has created not only in his platform, but business model and support of open source is a model of innovation the telcos must adopt.
Truth_In_Telecoms with Johnny Tarone
Johnny and I review the Messaging Monopolies post and drop a few hints on a compliant that will hopefully be filed next week.
TADHack Prize Pot now $16.5K as Telesign joins by running TADHack Belgrade
Telesign will be running TADHack Belgrade and will bring $6k to the prize pot, raising it to $16.5k. We’ll be updating the TADHack site over the weekend, and promoting it to the TADHack community!
Deutsche Telekom get your act together on programmable telecoms
DT just announced it became Ericsson’s first commercial operator partner in its drive to target developers and enterprises with access to communications and network APIs, a strategy pushed by the vendor after its $6.2 billion buy of Vonage last year.
I reviewed the Vonage Acquisition at the time it was announced in 2021. Essentially an exit deal for Jana Partners and Vonage, not a great deal for Ericsson or its telco customers. In the TADSummit Podcast, Johnny mentioned that one of the PE firms involved claimed the next best offer for Vonage was less than one third of what Ericsson paid.
Ericsson did have its own Parlay Gateway (think prehistoric CPaaS). All the reasons it walked away from selling Parlay / OneAPI to telcos are still there. CAMARA is just OneAPI 2.0.
Check out these posts to better understand the tough situation Ericsson and DT find themselves in.
- How can Nokia Leapfrog Ericsson in Programmable Telecoms?
- Why has service innovation in programmable communications been difficult for carriers?
But Deutsche Telekom already as a CPaaS
The Wholesale group already has CPaaS / programmable telecoms in hand, https://alanquayle.com/2022/03/cxtech-week-11-2022/. I covered their analyst briefing last year.
The Ericsson deal will confuse developers, and in my opinion is inferior to what the wholesale group has already created. Ericsson is playing the usual vendor politics inside a telco.
Why hasn’t a telco just offered their voice services through an API to customers, enterprises have been asking for well over 10 years!
Deutsche Telekom has to break out of its Echo Chamber
The GSMA, TMF, MEF, and all the other book clubs do not understand the programmable telecoms market. DT needs to talk with Twilio, Sinch, Syniverse, Telnyx, Jambonz, Infobip, Unifonic, TelecomsXchange, Telsign, and many others to understand the reality of the programmable comms business.
Check out the TADSummit Agenda, DT will learn more from being at TADSummit than from all the fawning sycophants chanting CAMARA, API, and developers. Not one DT person has commented on the 2 articles above, if DT is serious about this business it would have engaged in a discussion to understand how the industry could be wrong again.
Theta Lake and RingCentral Partner
Congrats to Sacha Nacar, a TADHack winner, who share Theta Lakes latest milestone with their partnership with RingCentral. Theta Lake’s category is Digital Communication Governance, and they now support RingCentral Contact Center, complementing their integration with RingCentral MVP. Theta Lake is now available on the RingCentral global price list, providing our joint customers seamless access and procurement of our offerings.
People, Gossip, and Frivolous Stuff
Paul Took is now Sales Professional at Dynatrace. I’ve known Paul since his Red Hat days.
Sunku Ranganath has started at Equinix as Principal Product Manager.
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