Connectivity aggregators & marketplaces

The multilayered supply chain

The ecosystem of global connectivity is being populated with new business models and evolving technologies.

This growth in supply chain complexity is driven by fresh demand for bandwidth capacity, quality and flexibility, resulting from global trends in cloud and streaming services, AI, data centres, edge computing and home working.

The stakeholders in this chain vary greatly, from infrastructure wholesalers to retailers of connectivity and value-added services. They are frequently buying from each other while seeking to secure positions within their specialist niche, leading to multiple interpretations of terms like B2C, B2B, B2X, and B2B2X. The terms NetCo, ServCo and SalesCo are also increasingly used to provide a layered level of clarity.

At the retail (SalesCo) level, the players range from small internet service providers (ISPs) selling basic home connectivity, to large managed service providers (MSPs) and System Integrators (SIs), connecting multinational enterprises and data centres with advanced and complex network services backed by SLAs.

At the network infrastructure level, the global rollout of fibre has seen the number of passive and active network providers grow enormously. Alongside established national telco incumbents, new alternative networks (Altnets) backed by infrastructural investors and energy utilities emerged resulting in hundreds of landline network carriers in larger countries. Satellite operators and private mobile network providers add to this party.

The business models of these network owners span from wholesale-only to vertically integrated wholesale and retail, and from single to multiple network access technologies.

Finally, the list of technologies and associated standards starts with ADSL & FTTC, FTTP, HFC, Ethernet, SD-WAN, 5G, FWA, SoGEA, Satellite, Open Access, NaaS and continues onwards and upwards.

Is it efficient?

Given the massive investment in connectivity infrastructure, a critical question arises: How efficient and automated is the supply chain, from the network beginning to a happy end-customer?

While infrastructure utilisation can be measured quantitatively, the efficiency of the supply chain is subject to experiential analysis. In short, few industry professionals believe that the overall global supply chain is efficient when it comes to the broad categories of selling, ordering, provisioning, and billing for connectivity. Complex technical interfaces, workflows and commercial contracts create friction, and manual processes abound at many layers.

The role of aggregators

A direct response to this supply chain complexity and inefficiency has been the emergence of connectivity aggregators and marketplaces. The concept involves bringing multiple supply options "under one roof" to make them more accessible to demand channels.

Network aggregators integrate multiple underlying wholesale networks, making their services accessible to ISPs and B2B channels through a standard northbound interface, meaning APIs and Portals. They function as connectivity marketplaces, reducing the technical, operational, commercial and governance friction in interconnecting retailers with both incumbent networks and Altnets. Some Aggregators also enhance their offering by building dedicated low latency highly resilient backhaul networks.

The connectivity products range in complexity from single-line consumer and business Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP), to multisite enterprise Ethernet with resilience and contract/partner specific pricing models across multiple dimensions

At another layer, service aggregators bundle connectivity with value added consumer and business services (security, cloud, applications etc) for downstream channel partners.

The automation challenge

The commercial and operational models for these complex B2B2X aggregator and marketplace ecosystems continue to emerge and evolve. While there is no single industry-wide definition of an aggregator, the trend is playing out globally in different ways, tailored to the needs of regional markets.

A common strand, however, is that they only succeed with maximum API-first automation to manage the multi-party orchestration, delivering a zero friction customer journey. This places new levels of demand on the underlying BSS software foundations, from product catalog and dynamic quotation and pricing through to order orchestration, fulfillment, billing and care. The flexibility, scalability and configurability challenges are at the high end of enterprise software.

As an example, managing commercial complexity presents a particular challenge. Every new dimension, such as provider, geography, bandwidth, contract term, or resilience option, multiplies the number of combinations that must be represented and managed. Organisations can easily end up managing thousands of product and pricing combinations, even when the underlying number of products is relatively modest. Complexity grows multiplicatively rather than linearly. Technical discovery gets the industry attention, but managing product and pricing complexity, in a way that remains manageable as new providers, commercial models and service variants are introduced, determines how well a marketplace can actually scale.

Unifying the industry fabric

Open access and interconnect standards are important enablers for supply chain efficiency. The term ‘open access’ was traditionally associated with forced regulation of national licensed networks to allow equal access. However, this has evolved with the industry itself choosing to define and adopt standards to reduce friction in the connectivity ecosystem.

International forums such as TM Forum, FTTH Council Europe, and Mplify Alliance collaborate with national forums to define standards, from commercial contracts to technical APIs.

Beyond open access standards, in Europe there is cross-industry work underway to turn the Digital Networks Act (DNA) into a competitive boost, reducing complexity and fragmentation, and to ensure that the Cybersecurity Act (CSA2) reinforces network resilience and security in a way that is proportionate without impacting competitiveness.

Who wins the next decade?

The network aggregation model creates supply chain efficiency with dynamic marketplaces. It builds a competitive open access environment that maximises the benefits of investments in fibre infrastructure.

By removing heavy technical barriers, it gives ISPs and B2B channels access to a superb range of wholesale carrier services on a national and global basis, providing channels of scale to wholesalers at much reduced opex. Ultimately, when stakeholders at each level of the ecosystem can focus on doing what they do best, the entire industry shifts toward better product choice and service quality for the consumer.