Will U.K. Business Largely Abandon Landlines Within 5 Years?

Some 65 percent of 500 U.K. chief information officers surveyed by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Virgin Media Business believe fixed network telephones “will disappear from everyday use within five years,” Virgin Media Business says.

PCs are the next most likely to become redundant according to 62 per cent of CIOs. In contrast, smart phones (13 percent) are seen as the least likely devices to be abandoned.

If those opinions wind up being correct, whether the magnitude or timing of the changes are accurate, there will be shifts of opportunity for suppliers of unified communications, business phone systems, mobile and fixed network service providers alike.

Aside from depressing sales of business phone systems, there are potentially greater opportunities for providers of hosted alternatives, especially those providers whose unified communications services are well suited to use of mobile devices.

But the impact is likely to be disparate. Some workers might find there is less need for unified communications. But call center functions obviously will continue to require a high level of support.

Collaboration functions could shift to other media types.

But if the CIOs are accurate, business voice rapidly is shifting to mobile modes, for most workers, with obvious architectural implications.

Tablet technology, on the other hand, is seen as something of a fad by about 24 percent of companies expect the devices to fall out of fashion.

By the end of 2012, 70 percent of the U.K. population is expected to have a smart device reliant on mobile connectivity, Virgin Media Business argues. Already, in the past year the amount of data consumed on the Virgin Media Business network jumped to 765 billion individual bits of data being transferred every second, erasing the previous mark for the Virgin Media Business network by 27 percent, Virgin Media Business says.

Historically, one might have argued that the higher cost of mobile calling would make it an unlikely substitute for fixed network calling. But the differences are shrinking.

The wholesale price of calling mobile phones from a landline is set to fall 85 percent by April 2015, according to  the U.K. Competition Appeals Tribunal.

The Ofcom decision to reduce mobile termination rates will mean an estimated caller savings of about  £800 million. Mobile termination rates could mean the cost of calls, on a per minute basis, would fall from 4.18p to just 0.65p.