Monday, February 28, 2011

Voice Remains a Crucial Communications Function

Global international long-distance and bandwidth trends remain in character, according to the latest TeleGeography data. Users are consuming about 60 percent more bandwidth every year, while pricing per bit continues to drop. International voice growth continues to slow, but still is growing.

But global trends obscure clear differences. In the U.S. market, for example, consumers are talking less even on their mobiles. Nielsen reports that the amount of time mobile subscribers talk has dropped to 700 minutes per month in 2010. That includes incoming calls. A survey by CTIA, a trade group, shows that the average length of a mobile call has dropped from just over three minutes to one minute and 40 seconds since mid-2007.
Voice remains a crucial communications feature. What is less true is that voice communications is the most-strategic driver of service provider revenue. Increasingly, that role is being assumed by data services of various types, on both landline and mobile networks.

Less talking also does not necessarily mean less phone use, in one sense. According to Nielsen the number of paid texts per subscriber has grown rapidly over the same period, recently surpassing 700 per month. But there seems to be some substitution effect.

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