More Carrier Over the Top Services Launching

A few more European mobile service providers are jumping into the over the top voice and messaging app business.  In Spain, Movistar, Orange and Vodafone, Spain's three leading mobile service providers, have launched "Rich Communication Services" using the "joyn" brand.

That makes Spain the first country in the world to offer a fully interoperable carrier-owned over the top voice and messaging app, meaning that any customers of any of the mobile service providers can communicate with each other. 

In Germany, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone both support joyn. 

The idea is that joyn will allow mobile service provides to create a very large community of users, with access to "rich" voice and messaging ("rich" generally implies support for video) features. So both "scale" and "feature richness" are viewed as part of the strategy. 

There are about three or four different ways mobile service providers globally can react. About half the options are hostile or unfriendly to the consumer. Carriers can block use of over the top apps, or charge extra fees for people who use the generally free apps. Neither of those approaches are especially desirable in competitive markets where another provider will avoid blocking or charging.

There are two approaches that are less surly ways of approaching the problem. Joyn is one way of competing with a carrier-owned alternative intended from the start to be a "third party" brand. 

In other cases, carriers have created their own branded OTT apps. The level of competition in a given market tends to suggest whether mobile service providers should offer their own OTT apps, or avoid doing so.

In markets where voice and messaging revenue already is sharply declining, competing might be the only choice. In other markets, where there is less pressure, service providers generally will resist jumping into branded OTT voice and messaging apps, to avoid cannibalizing carrier voice and messaging.

In other cases, as with Verizon Wireless, carriers simply offer unlimited domestic calling and texting as a basic network access fee, to undercut the value proposition of the "free" OTT apps.   That arguably works best where there is a very-large internal calling market. 


But third party developers aren't stopping. A newer trend is use of the "WebRTC" platform to create rnd audio communications from inside the context of a browser. Vidtel, for example,  now support the built-in ability to connect WebRTC-enabled browsers to enterprise video conferencing infrastructure. 

Vidtel says it iis the first to bridge WebRTC browsers with 3rd party video conferencing infrastructure such as Cisco, Polycom, or Vidtel’s own MeetMe service without the need for plugins.