Driving Innovation in the Mobile Communications Landscape

Here we hear from three very different voices in telecommunications - on how mobile communications ‘telemedicine’ can ease the pressure on healthcare services, and the race for new revenue streams in the telecoms sector. 

Reducing the pressure on healthcare services with turbocharged communication

Kat James is the Director of New Projects at Consultant Connect, a leading UK telemedicine provider and part of the Teladoc Group. She’s spent all of her career in and around technology, first in an export consultancy in France. She then returned to her home country, Germany, where Kat joined Atos, a global information technology company. 

“There, I worked mainly in Sales and General Management, before making the UK my long-term home eight years ago. I moved from the corporate to the start-up world and discovered my passion for health tech.” 

Kat balances things outside of work, with precious family time, music gigs and good food and wine - all a part of good mental health and social wellbeing. 

Consultant Connect is a telemedicine provider, which provides technology services and clinical capacities to improve patient care in the NHS. 

“Our app turbocharges communication between NHS primary care clinicians, such as GPs and nurses, and specialist consultants via secure phone calls and GDPR-compliant sharing of photos and messages,” she says.

This rapid access to specialist advice improves patient care by ensuring they go to the right place, first time. Invariably, this often leads to the avoidance of unnecessary hospital visits which holds true for over two thirds of interactions on our platform.

“To date, we’ve facilitated over 2m calls and processed 3m photos through our app. Last year, it helped over 400,000 patients avoid unnecessary hospital admissions,” Kat shares.

The company is improving communication services by formalising, speeding up and scaling what doctors have always done: Discuss a patient case with another colleague/specialist when they have exhausted all options within their remit. 

“Previously, GPs and paramedics would have to go through hospital switchboards to get specialist advice, which could take hours or even days which then often meant they would not be able to do it and would have to revert back to sending patients to A&E or refer onto hospital lists with long waits.”

The solution is simple yet powerful - the app allows GPs and paramedics to connect with available consultants within under 30 seconds. This means clinicians get the advice they need straight away and ensure their patients get sent to the right place first time. 

“Our app is designed to handle both urgent and non-urgent cases seamlessly, allowing for a more flexible and responsive healthcare system,” she explains. “Not only do these interactions improve the lives of patients in terms of their physical and mental wellbeing, but also the lives of NHS staff by relieving the pressures and burdens of the waiting lists.”

How BT Wholesale's MVNO vision is changing the mobile landscape

BT Wholesale is part of the Business division within BT, where the company works together to power communication through partnerships that connect business and people for good. 

The MVNO team in BT Wholesale has the privilege of being able to provide wholesale access, to the UK’s number one network for over 11 years now. 

Nick Wootten is the MVNO Director at BT Wholesale and has had an interest in mobile since he began his career at Orange in the networks team. 

“I was responsible for ensuring there was sufficient capacity in the network in a period of high growth for the industry,” Nick says. “Years later, I was part of creating Wholesale as a brand-new business unit within Orange, which then evolved into EE, before being acquired by BT.” 

Throughout his career, Nick has seen how the industry has matured. In his first role, Nick’s main challenge was ensuring customers had enough capacity, now he’s working with BT Wholesale to ensure that assets are utilised to their maximum capacity.

“My team helps companies bring mobile propositions to market under their own brand using wholesale access to BT Group’s EE network. The core team focuses on winning deals and working with our partners to help them with the tools they need to grow their MVNO business. We are also supported by the larger virtual team that sits across product, finance, commercial, technology and product management. 

“Our main goal is to ensure the MVNO function delivers a high-quality service to customers as the market continues to evolve.”

There are many key trends within the mobile market that are helping MVNOs account for an ever-increasing share of the market. 

Firstly, Nick has seen that more customers are buying their handsets and mobile plans separately, keeping their handsets for longer and looking for value from their service providers. This means that the addressable market for MVNOs has grown, as customers do not expect their mobile provider to also provide them with a handset.

Secondly, eSIM is starting to become more prevalent. 

“At the moment, most eSIM use cases are driven from the roaming sector. However, with customers increasingly expecting to be served digitally, eSIM will be adopted widely meaning customers can seamlessly move operators at the click of a button,” he explains. “Finally, whilst end-users are looking for value, quality remains important too. With BT Wholesale’s strategic imperative to build the strongest foundations with the best mobile and fibre networks, including IoT solutions, we can help partners best service customers.”

Additionally, there is greater emphasis across the industry to become more sustainable. Low-power networks are energy-efficient, leading to more demand for them from customers. 

MVNOs and connectivity providers that invest in low-power networks will benefit from greater customer satisfaction, be able to attract new customers and offer more innovative solutions to meet changing customer needs.

The race for new revenue streams across communications

Marco Palladino is the Co-Founder and CTO of Kong Inc., a global leader in API management. 

“We work with many Global 2000 companies and have well over 700 SMEs. In 2023, Kong surpassed the US$100m annual recurring revenue milestone and continued on in hyper growth mode.” 

To best explain what Kong does and why it’s so important to the mobile world, first, let’s look at why APIs are so important. 

APIs are the underlying technology that powers every mobile application and every experience in the digital world. 85% of internet traffic is now APIs. Where the internet used to be websites, blog posts and emails, it’s now cloud-based applications and microservices sharing data and talking to one another via APIs.

Kong’s job is to provide the infrastructure for all of this. 

“That means a platform to manage the full API lifecycle as well as things like performance control, security, caching, versioning and, increasingly, interactions with AI,” Marco explains. “It means a unified control plane and standardised way to manage APIs, to consume them, to monitor them, to expose them, whether they are external, internal, in pretty much any capacity.”

With Kong taking care of the infrastructure, developers are free to be more productive in building exciting and innovative new mobile applications. While this is happening, the infrastructure ensures that all applications adhere to security, compliance and privacy protocols so that businesses can scale more effectively.

According to one report, the global API telecom market is expected to reach US$886bn by 2030. This is because APIs open the door to so many new monetisation opportunities. Telecom companies are now racing to make sure they are set up to own as much of that space as possible.

“In one example, Orange and Nokia have expanded their partnership to lay the groundwork for enhanced access to a developer portal, where the developer community can exploit Orange’s 5G network capabilities to create new applications for customers in Europe. Nokia has signed similar agreements with many other telecoms leaders around the world too. It doesn’t stop with Nokia though. Developer portals are opening up across all major players in the global market.”

Through these portals, developers are given access to software development kits (SDKs) and network API documentation. With that they can create and test all kinds of new applications that can easily plug-in to the host network to bring new enhancements to user experience. 

“More open access collaboration between telecoms companies and the developer community is how the market is growing with APIs,” he continues. “It completely rewrites the rules on R&D in a way that is designed to accelerate new innovations to market faster than we have seen before. But it’s only possible within a governed and secure environment provided by the right infrastructure.”

In the telecoms sector, there is a lot of API integration activity around connectivity services, but use-cases expand to a whole host of opportunities. 

“Take billings and subscriptions,” Marco adds. “Developers are working on new applications to automate billing cycles more effectively, or to manage customer subscriptions in real-time. Other applications will facilitate more cross selling based on individual customer behaviours, or streamline the process of signing up to flexible payment and upgrade options so that more customers opt in.”

5G and later 6G development is where Marco believes the sector is going to see the Internet of Everything really start to take shape in our daily lives. 

“This is when connectivity is going to be truly ubiquitous and much of it will be run by AI,” he shares. “This is exactly why APIs are so important. They provide the central nervous system that enables everything to connect and exchange data. IoT is only possible via APIs. Likewise, AI can only interact with us, with the world, or with other AI via APIs. And the capacity for all of this is growing with 5G and 6G. It’s a really exciting time.”

The telecommunications industry provides the touchpoint between the people and the technology, but it’s APIs that are the underlying heroes making it all happen.

To read the full story in the magazine click HERE

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