Our 11th Annual Conference marked a shift in our organisation, from facilitating collaboration to taking action and creating and offering solutions. Work Groups, recommendations and whitepapers will always be a cornerstone of our collaborative approach, but we’re developing some new initiatives that are designed to support the success of the Carrier industry as a whole.
Our Annual Conference, hosted at International Telecoms Week 2019 in Atlanta, was an opportunity to meet and share the work of our members and discuss how we’re going to bring new solutions to market. Together, we were able to present ideas, answer questions and gather feedback on our new initiatives.
The 11th edition began with an opening message from our Chairman, Philippe Millet. He discussed our motivations and purpose as an organisation and outlined i3forum’s key initiatives moving forward. For instance, creating an Anti-Fraud Code of Conduct, discussing Our CLI management and verification system, and our innovative market database project.
Our keynote speaker, Joel Stradling, Research Director at Global Network & IT Services, discussed collaboration and the fight against fraud in the Carrier industry. He explained how moving towards a Partnership Ecosystem would help to face a “common enemy”, not to mention how knowledge and communication would also develop with a collaborative model.
Following the keynote, we launched i3forum Insights with our partners TeleGeography. i3forum Insights is a comprehensive market database for international Voice services. The not-for-profit initiative enables Carriers to use anonymised and aggregated industry data for the planning, optimisation and pricing in their Voice businesses.
i3forum Insights is powered by TeleGeography, enabling users to benefit from a comprehensive database and analytics platform. Michael Owings, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at TeleGeography, explained the data management and visualisation functionalities in his presentation. One of his key messages was that it is “a platform for Carriers, by Carriers.”
i3forum’s Technology Group presented the findings of their International Long Distance (ILD) VoIP and VoIPX survey. Ten Tier 1 Carriers agreed to take part in the study, and the results suggested there had been strong growth in End-to-End ILD deliverance for both VoIP and VoIPX methods. 53% of international traffic was transported End-to-End for VoIP in 2018, as well as a 142% growth in End-to-End VoIPX traffic.
Our Numbering Plan initiative was also launched at ITW 2019. Accuracy is the main driver of mission-critical activities, for example; routing, pricing and dispute resolution. So, why do some Carriers spend significant resources maintaining their imperfect and heterogeneous databases? We presented a case study of over 1000 Carriers dealing with over 190 countries and argued why utilising a centralised platform is a much more simple, accurate and cost-efficient method.
Alongside our annual conference, we held an anti-fraud conference. Representatives from several global Carriers met to discuss Voice fraud within the industry. Hosted by Robert Benlolo, Senior Project Manager at Tata Communications, the group discussed the KPIs for international Carriers and how standardisation of measurements of fraud is a necessity. The consensus of the debate was that we must work together in order to fight Voice fraud in our ecosystem. The anti-fraud conference was a huge milestone for us. At an event that brings together the whole Carrier ecosystem, it was great to see our members collaborating to support the entire industry.
After the event we hosted a cocktail networking party. We were lucky enough to engage with some very interesting people from the industry.
From i3forum, we would like to thank everyone that presented at our conference and to all those who attended. We hope the overall experience was insightful to your company.
If you would like to discover more about our 11th annual conference, you can access all of the event presentations here.
We hope to be at next year’s event and see you there.
If you’re passionate about industry-wide collaboration and driving success in an evolving market, you can become an i3forum member. Becoming an i3forum member grants you access to our large community. You’ll be able to communicate and share knowledge, benefit from our community’s actions, test concepts and ideas, and also leverage our brand to develop compliance and strengthen creditability. Click here for further details.
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