Summary Bullets:

• Orange Wholesale together with ng-voice to launch its IMS-as-a-service, offering a cloud-based alternative designed to remove the complexity of traditional IMS deployments.
• The new solution will deliver voice services with a lower cost of ownership while removing the operational complexity of maintaining its own IMS infrastructure.

As international voice margins continue to decline, wholesale carriers are under growing pressure to reinvent a revenue stream that has been in continual decline for years. Orange Wholesale has teamed up with ng-voice, to launch an IP multimedia subsystem (IMS)-as-a-service offering designed to modernize how telecom operators deploy and manage their voice services.

This new solution reflects a growing industry shift toward cloud-native architecture and service-based delivery models. This announcement combines both Orange Wholesale’s global network expertise along with ng-voice’s fully containerized IMS technology as it looks to simplify voice infrastructure while removing the operational complexity and cost for service providers around the world. As networks continue to evolve toward 5G, IoT, and software-defined infrastructure, this model could reshape how voice services are delivered and monetized. But could this be the answer that finally transforms voice from a costly legacy system into a scalable digital service?

For decades, voice services have remained one of the most essential offerings for service providers, even with the emergence of data and digital services that have muscled in to take center stage. However, traditional IMS deployments have been considered rather complex, expensive, and not to mention resource-intensive. To date, network operators have typically needed to build and maintain their own IMS infrastructure, requiring a considerable amount of capital investment and expertise to maintain. As networks continue to sunset legacy technologies such as 2G and 3G while offering newer services like voice over LTE (VoLTE), voice over new radio (VoNR), and IoT connectivity, the burden for telecom operators continues to grow.

The collaboration between Orange Wholesale and ng-voice will introduce a fresh approach to how operators can deploy IMS. Removing the need for each operator to build and maintain their own infrastructure, they can tap into a shared cloud-native platform delivered as a service. It’s a smarter, lighter approach that lets operators focus on innovation and services, while the heavy lifting of IMS runs seamlessly in the cloud. By shifting from owning and managing complex infrastructure to simply consuming it as a service, telecom providers can roll out voice services faster, scale with ease, and focus more on innovation than upkeep. In a competitive market where agility is becoming more critical, this flexibility could provide a meaningful advantage for mobile and mobile virtual network operators.

While Orange Wholesale continues to innovate with this new IMS-as-a-service push could hit a few roadblocks including tricky legacy network integrations, heightened security and privacy concerns in a share cloud setup, and how operators can differentiate their voice services versus competitors using the same platform feeling a bit too “one-size-fits-all.”

This latest announcement from Orange Wholesale also aligns with the carriers’ long-term vision to further expand their network-as-a-service portfolio by enabling more innovative telco-as-a-service-based solutions. By shifting customers toward a managed, platform-based infrastructure, Orange aims to unlock greater revenue potential by driving increased network efficiencies while supporting its broader sustainability goals.