Blog
Wholesale Monetization
BSS
ZIRA Group
Wholesale telecom has outgrown its original role. For years, it was built around a simple premise: operators sell excess capacity—partners consume it. The relationship was linear, predictable, and by today’s standards limited, and that premise no longer holds.
What’s changing is both technology and the nature of the players themselves. Mobile operators are expanding into fixed services, fiber providers are layering digital offerings on top of connectivity, and satellite operators are no longer niche and are becoming integral to global coverage strategies. At the same time, entirely new entrants, MVNOs, digital-first ISPs, and platform-driven service providers are stepping in with expectations shaped outside traditional telecom.
The result is a wholesale landscape where boundaries are increasingly irrelevant, and a partner becomes both a buyer of capacity and a builder of services.
Wholesale has become inherently multi-domain
One of the more subtle shifts in telecom is how wholesale portfolios have expanded by convergence.
What used to sit in separate domains, IP transit, roaming, fiber backhaul, satellite capacity, and MVNO enablement, now needs to work together. Increasingly, they are expected to be consumed together.
A regional ISP might combine fiber backhaul with international IP transit and layer on value-added services. An MVNO may depend not just on SIM provisioning, but on APIs, real-time charging, and partner-driven service logic. A satellite operator entering a new market might need terrestrial interconnect and roaming agreements to deliver a seamless experience.
None of these scenarios fit neatly into the traditional wholesale model. They require coordination across domains that were never designed to interact this closely.
Network isn’t the limitation but the model around it
It’s tempting to assume that network capability is the constraint, but in most cases, it isn’t.
The real limitation sits in how wholesale is structured and exposed.
Many wholesale systems still reflect a world where services are predefined, relationships are static, and changes are slow by design. That works when offerings are stable and partners adapt to the operator. But today, partners expect the opposite.
They expect to configure services and not just consume them, to combine capabilities across domains, to launch quickly, iterate, and adjust without waiting for underlying systems to catch up.
This is where friction emerges because the operational and commercial layers cannot keep pace.
And in a B2B2X environment that friction compounds. Each additional layer, each new partner, each new service, amplifies the need for flexibility.
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Learn moreComposability is about control
“Composable” has become a widely used term, often reduced to a technical pattern. But in wholesale, its significance is more fundamental as it changes who holds control.
In a composable model, capabilities are not bundled into fixed products. They are exposed as building blocks: bandwidth, connectivity types, SIM lifecycle management, APIs, policy controls, and value-added services.
Partners can assemble these blocks into their own offerings, shaped by their market, their customers, and their pace of innovation. And this is a shift from selling products to enabling creation.
It also introduces a different kind of responsibility for operators. Instead of defining every possible offer upfront, they need to ensure that the underlying capabilities are consistent, interoperable, and accessible in a way that others can use effectively.
That’s not a small change and it requires rethinking of systems and assumptions about ownership, speed, and standardization.
Integration is where systems start to matter
One way to understand this shift is to look at how wholesale capabilities are organized.
When interconnect, partner management, catalog, and revenue processes operate in isolation, even simple changes become complex. Introducing a new partner model or combining services across domains often requires stitching together workflows that were never meant to align.
But when these elements are treated as parts of a coherent whole, while still remaining modular, the dynamic changes.
Capabilities become reusable, relationships become easier to manage at scale, and new service combinations stop being exceptions and start becoming standard practice.
This is where the idea of composability stops being abstract and becomes operational.
If wholesale is to support multi-domain services and partner-driven models, then the underlying capabilities, interconnect, partner management, service definition, and revenue handling cannot exist in isolation. They need to work as parts of the same system while still remaining flexible enough to be combined in different ways.
That’s the logic behind ZIRA’s wholesale suite.
By bringing together Interconnect, TRM, Catalog, and Revenue Management into a unified yet modular suite, the focus shifts from managing individual services to enabling how those services are used. Not as fixed offers, but as capabilities that can be structured around different partner needs; whether that’s an MVNO, a fiber-based ISP, or a satellite operator expanding its footprint.
In that sense, the platform is not defining the business model. It’s making room for multiple ones to exist within the same ecosystem.
The more difficult question
There’s a tendency to frame this transformation as a technology upgrade. It’s not. At its core, this is a shift in how operators see their role in the ecosystem.
Are they providers of predefined services? Or are they enablers of other companies’ business models?
The difference is subtle in wording but significant in practice because in the new wholesale economy, value is no longer created solely by what an operator delivers directly but is increasingly defined by what others can build on top of it.
And that’s a much harder capability to develop, but also a far more scalable one.
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