With the 2026 edition of the Wholesale World Congress (WWC) now concluded, it is time to reflect on everything we experienced over those days of knowledge sharing, industry insights, and networking with the international wholesale telecommunications community.
This year's edition left us with something different from 2025. There was no new trend displacing the previous one. Instead, it showed that the wholesale business has fully become a single layer of infrastructure and services, where the sector's longest-standing businesses and its most emerging ones now sit at the same table.
Throughout the event, the Plusmo booth hosted a steady stream of meetings with wholesale carriers and companies from across the globe. "Across these conversations, we saw a clear pattern. On one hand, conversational marketing through messaging channels and CPaaS platforms continues to gain ground as one of the preferred ways for businesses to communicate with end users. On the other, within SMS traffic, the casino business remains a significant source of revenue for operators and wholesale carriers," explains Javier Wullich, Senior Business Development & Product Manager at Plusmo.
“Our conversations revealed a clear pattern. On the one hand, conversational marketing through messaging channels and CPaaS platforms continues to gain ground as one of the preferred ways for businesses to communicate with end users. On the other hand, within SMS traffic, the casino segment remains a significant source of revenue for operators and wholesalers,” explains Javier Wullich, Senior Business Development & Product Manager at Plusmo.
The booth also became a setting for discussions around alternative technologies for SMS routing, as well as two business areas that continue to gain momentum year after year: Mobile ID services and Open Gateway solutions. Three years after its launch, Open Gateway now brings together 86 operator groups representing more than 300 networks and 80% of global mobile connections, according to GSMA figures presented in Barcelona earlier this year. These numbers show that Open Gateway has already become an operational standard.
We also saw increasingly strong interest in IoT connectivity through SIM and eSIM technologies. In 2026 alone, eSIM adoption is expected to grow by 30%, reaching 1.5 billion devices worldwide, with logistics, oil and gas, and smart street lighting among the sectors driving that growth.
What distinguishes this year’s event is not any one of these trends individually, but the fact that they now occupy the same business space at the same time. Conversational messaging, casino-related traffic, identity verification, and IoT are no longer competing for budget or attention; instead, they are increasingly being combined within the solutions we provide to our customers.
This is wholesale infrastructure operating as what it truly is: an invisible layer underpinning a significant share of digital communications, often without end users even knowing it exists. The numbers reinforce this shift. While growth in IoT and Open Gateway is now measured in hundreds of millions of connections, these areas continue to coexist with the industry’s more traditional and relationship-driven businesses.
To conclude, Wullich emphasizes: “What we see year after year is that these technologies are no longer competing with one another. Today, we work with customers that need messaging, identity verification, and IoT connectivity at the same time, as part of the same solution. In short, that is what has truly changed in the business.”
In particular, the convergence of different channels on CPaaS platforms (SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, voice, email, etc.) and the growing integration of AI-powered bots into communication are two key developments in the evolution of our industry.
Plusmo has built this market shift into its products and services through its Plusmo Engage offering, further strengthened by strategic collaborations with marketing and advertising agencies.
The value no longer lies in the communication channels themselves, but in the Conversational Marketing services built on top of them. This approach generates concrete demand for messages, and Plusmo supports operators' clients in turning that demand into effective conversations.
At WWC 2026, Plusmo Engage's Conversational Marketing proposition was presented to, and met with strong interest from, MNOs and aggregators.
At Plusmo, across our different business units, we continue to be part of each of these conversations. We believe the challenge is no longer about betting on a single winning technology, but rather about integrating all these components into one reliable infrastructure.
