TMCnews Featured Article

Welcome to the (20)10 Days of Techness. This is the seventh installment of a 10-part series of postings that will discuss prevalent trends during past year. Happy Holidays!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

While M&A has been big among service providers, which would seem to shrink the number of companies hawking communications solutions to businesses and consumers, VoIP and the prevalence of broadband have at the same time lowered barriers of entry, enabling new providers to join the fray.

Indeed, Aculab’s (News - Alert) Ian Colville, product manager, notes that there’s a new breed of service providers, including twilio and Voxeo, delivering communications as a service. And growth in SIP trunking, he adds, makes the move to hosted IP-PBX or other hosted voice services easier.

Tom Skidmore of BillSoft (News - Alert) adds that newer, non-traditional entrants in telecom services also include companies Best Buy and Walmart, which are reselling the services of network operators, but under their own brands. Best Buy announced earlier this year plans to sell its own branded version of Clearwire (News - Alert) 4G broadband services. Walmart sells prepaid services from all the big U.S. cellular providers and this fall announced plans to introduce a Walmart-branded post-paid cellular offer.