One of the biggest differences is in their geographical presence. The cloud platforms very rarely have a local presence in every country – whereas this has been key to how most global telco providers have grown.

For telco providers, physical infrastructure on the ground in a given country went hand-in-hand with their sales, marketing and customer service presence.

In contrast, for the platforms, the whole point was to be software-driven and asset-light. They wanted to use internet infrastructure to provide their service globally in a highly scalable and cost-efficient way.

But cloud platforms’ frequent lack of a local presence – especially outside of core markets in North America and Western Europe – is now a major challenge in today’s voice market.

That’s because these platforms have added national voice functionality alongside their Internet-based calling and messaging. Voice calling remains a hugely effective and popular mode of communication, which enterprise customers always demand.

And now a very high volume of voice calls can get routed across cloud platforms’ international networks.

This can cause huge expense for platforms who weren’t necessarily built with that usage in mind.

It also gains the attention of regulators, who start to view the cloud platforms as telco operators in all but name. That means rules about charging, routing, number allocation, and “know your customer”.

Wavecrest was designed to solve this problem for cloud communications providers. We understand regulators’ expectations, we have long-standing relationships with operators around the world, and we provide a managed service with human expertise to make compliance hassle-free.

Providing voice in a cloud-based environment isn’t as straightforward as it might look on paper. It takes technical expertise and in-depth regulatory knowledge.

Cloud comms providers need partners who can handle the challenges of voice for them, so they can focus on what they do best.