The Telstra Wholesale Market Extender™ Suite is an innovative new white-label solution that makes it easier and quicker for brands to launch fixed and mobile services. Discover why this can help brands to grow new revenue opportunities.

Standing up a new telco is traditionally not an easy undertaking. Setting up three at once, each capable of housing multiple tenants in the space of only 12 months, would be considered a daunting challenge. Yet this is exactly what the Telstra Wholesale products team has done by delivering the new Telstra Wholesale Market Extender suite.

“We are excited to be able to launch the Market Extender Suite. We’ve worked with partners and trial customers over the past year to create these white-label telco propositions for pre-paid mobile, post-paid mobile and fixed nbn™ broadband and voice services. It offers really innovative new capabilities for brands,” said Nathan Gin, Product Manager at Telstra Wholesale.

“Before now, when brands approached us to set up a mobile or fixed service, we only offered access to network capabilities. The customer had to build out the rest of the product, back of house and customer support in order to offer a full service. Market Extender makes it possible for brands to focus on their customers with Telstra Wholesale delivering their core telco product and support services,” Nathan added.

What’s in the box

Market Extender Suite gives brands the opportunity to offer fixed or mobile services where the core broadband, voice and mobile products, plus the necessary telco support functions are provided by Telstra Wholesale. It means customers can outsource enablement, ISP functions, and support and customer service functions, in a way that best suits their business.

“With Market Extender, customers can focus on bringing in value to the business through the telco service. And unlike some other propositions in the market, a Market Extender customer continues to own the relationship with the end-users,” Market Extender Product Owner Tim Scholtes said.

In creating the suite, Nathan, Tim and their team utilised APIs to help streamline processes such as address, identification, credit check and even payments. The services are delivered through an intuitive user portal, enabling customers to spend less time managing processes and more time on marketing and brand-building.

The team built Market Extender Suite to be modular and fit with customers’ existing investments. For instance, a brand could use Market Extender as a full standalone white-label service via the user portal, or they could choose to integrate one or more elements of Market Extender directly into their own internal systems.

“We can flex the build so it plays nicely with other third-party applications,” Nathan explained. “This meansthat customers can integrate their existing CRM or digital channels.”

The Market Extender nbn product offering utilises a purpose built, fully scalable, multi-tenanted, geo-redundant nbn ISP network with DPI and DDOS traffic management capabilities. “This allows our customers to on-board standard offerings in a 4-6 week window as opposed to up to 18 months with direct build models,” Tim said.

Opening up opportunities for new players

Market Extender is ideally suited for brands including retailers and utility companies who may not already offer core telecommunications services, or existing service providers that address niche segments of the marketplace.

The team at Telstra Wholesale decided to investigate a white-label solution after being approached by several companies that didn’t want to set up the supporting services. “That input from customers and partners continued throughout the development process and into the trial phase,” Tim said.

“There’s no doubt the end result has been shaped by the input we received from our customers. We listened and watched the market to see what was going to be most useful to users. And our customers provided very valuable insights, including those who participated in pre-release trials. We also leveraged the knowledge of our partners at the Inabox group. They were able to provide input on best practice from their own experience which helped us create such an innovative white-label solution,” Nathan said.

Just the beginning for Market Extender

That co-creation will continue as the team develops the Market Extender product with insights from customer trials.

“We prioritised the most important features for the launch and we will listen to customer feedback and investigate further bundling capabilities. For example, we might look at helping with the next level of logistics with the inclusion of handsets and other devices,” Tim says.

“We are also excited about integrating new use cases and technologies. We will work with our customers to build out and prioritise the roadmap for innovative new services or technologies as they become available.”

“It is an exciting time,” Nathan adds. “Market Extender is a new way of selling products but more importantly it opens up more opportunities for non-telco brands that are looking to enter the market, which ultimately benefits the end customer and the market as a whole.”