One wonders how long mobile carriers will wait before launching their own lower-cost global calling plans. At some point they will. The only issue is how much market share they are willing to tolerate losing to VoIP providers before they counterattack. Raketu is the latest contestant in the business calling space, by virtue of its compatibility with RIM BlackBerry devices.
What is emerging now is the IP equivalent of "over the top long distance" calling plans that used to be prevalent in the U.S. market. Under such plans, created in large part for reasons of regulatory compliance, users selected one provider for local calling and then another provider for long distance. At one point, one could not select one's local voice carrier for that purpose.
So you see the business effect: a regulatory framework creates an entire "long distance calling" business. It lasts for a while, as competition knocks prices way down. Then, at some point, regulators decide markets are competitive enough to allow the local phone companies back into long distance.
And then the independent long distance industry collapses.
VoIP over mobile, indeed VoIP itself, is headed for such a day of reckoning, at least for that portion of its use as a substitute for landline or wireless calling. Nobody knows when the day will come. It might come carrier by carrier. But at some point, mobile and wired service providers are going to reach a point where it makes sense to offer much-lower global calling from their existing services and devices.
That isn't to say independents will not gain share and build businesses in the short term. Nor is it to say VoIP features embedded into other experiences are likewise susceptible to telco repositioning and pricing. It is to say that past telco responses to regulatory and technologiccal change offer some obvious clues about what they will do in the future.
As scale players, they tend to ignore new threats and markets until some critical mass or clear strategic interest emerges. Then they move, and fairly quickly. They'll do so again.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Mobile VoIP Proliferates
Labels:
business VoIP,
mobile VoIP,
P2P
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
U.S. Cable Operators Will Lose Home Broadband Share, But How Much, and to Whom?
Comcast says it will lose about 100,000 home broadband accounts in the fourth quarter of 2024, a troublesome statistic given that service’s...
-
We have all repeatedly seen comparisons of equity value of hyperscale app providers compared to the value of connectivity providers, which s...
-
It really is surprising how often a Pareto distribution--the “80/20 rule--appears in business life, or in life, generally. Basically, the...
-
One recurring issue with forecasts of multi-access edge computing is that it is easier to make predictions about cost than revenue and infra...
No comments:
Post a Comment