What Makes the Best Wholesale Carrier?

Richard Brandon - 9 March 2011

MLL Telecom is a wholesale carrier providing services to mobile and fixed operators across the UK. We've just posted growth in new business of 102% year on year, up from 68% growth the previous year, so that suggests we are getting something right.

MLL Telecom takes a completely different position to the traditional wholesale providers. Before I explain how, I'd like to be clear that there will always be a need for large global wholesalers who have fibre infrastructure spanning popular international routes and domestic national backbones. But when you look at the reality of their services, most of their routes overlap with one another. At the domestic level they are often based on the footprint of older utilities; power lines, railways, even canals. And they all have pretty much the same coverage. So competition is intense, which is good for retail customers, but supply is limited to the same old routes.

The aspect of wholesale services that is often overlooked is extending their reach to match the retail customer's access requirements. This is, quite frankly, the hard bit and is often left de facto to the incumbent PTT. It's harder technically because it involves reaching more remote locations, and it's harder commercially because there is no guarantee of massive traffic aggregation along any one route. But the prize is great, because it's usually this off-net access or backhaul capacity that is costing the retail service providers the most money.

It takes a different tool set and a different mentality to operate in this space. Route kilometres are not relevant if they cover the same routes as everyone else's. This is all about coverage and building tailored wholesale networks, for example wireless networks that fill in the exact gaps the retail operators need to fill. Getting within a kilometre of a mobile operator's cell-site just isn't close enough. They need capacity delivered and maintained right to the tower sitting in the corner of a field or the top of a hill. At MLL Telecom we're using a blend of technologies, sometimes fibre, sometimes high capacity microwave, and we even use bundled copper circuits in remote areas. We need MPLS for privacy and QoS and take advantage of LLU (Local Loop Unbundling) to re-use the PTT's infrastructure. Our value comes from designing the networks using the best tools for the job. Of course fibre will always offer the highest capacities at 10Gbit/s, but we have wholesale Ethernet microwave links delivering mobile LTE backhaul at 650Mbit/s, and even copper circuits can deliver 40Mbit/s Ethernet which is more than enough to deliver services to many smaller locations.

So when we talk about wholesale services we tend to think about the major interconnects points, but in practice the bigger problem facing most retail service providers is finding cost-effective off-net access. This is the area of wholesale services that is growing fast, and an area that requires a new breed of wholesale provider to deliver it.

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