John Linton ......the future for mobile voice services enters a new period of uncertainty after delivering mega profits almost since their inception.
Another day - another major problem in the Australian communications industry.....it seems to be becoming a mantra. While this brief article does little more than skim the surface it does remind the casual observer of the trend that has been evident for many years - most evident in the destruction of Telstra's PSTN revenues:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/4g-to-kill-mobile-voice-market-20100824-13qhh.html
You may or may not agree with the 'logic' of this article but what is very definitely happening in mobile voice usage is that the use of VoIP is beginning to erode the 'standard' mobile call usage. Despite the 'caps' that promise 4,000,000 calls for three and a half cents a month (or whatever the latest claim is) it is becoming obvious that the use of MoIP is increasing and it is likely that at some future point the drop in call revenue will begin to hurt the 'construction' of voice call based mobile plans just as VoIP has begun to decimate the PSTN call revenue.
This is obviously known to major mobile carriers and is by no means particularly bad news in the medium/long term but it will make for quite a considerable turmoil in the short term. People like me (low volume users of mobile telephone calls) have only used MoIP for getting on for 2 years now. As I pay cash for my hand sets, I don't get sucked in to paying a large amount of money each month to make the few mobile calls I make and I still have a mobile service that mobile phone addicts can call me on. My 40 - 50 mobile calls cost me $A4 or $A5 each month and my SMS messages cost me 5 cents each - I use three or four at the most in a month. So, apart from the 'depreciation' on the handset (which I keep until it breaks - around five years per handset) I seldom spend more that $A5.00 to use a mobile phone. I realise I am not 'typical' but then I also realise that most mobile usage is now falling in to the 'addiction' category that is basically useless and totally unnecessary and, one day, will be seen as that by a growing percentage of the addicts that adopt it.
In the mean time the concept of a 'voice call' being any different to 'a data transit' will more quickly fade away and 'pure' data phone services will become the norm rather than an add on to a telephone service. By early 2011 most mobile carriers are predicting that 'data' revenue will exceed 'telephone call' revenue on their services and that has happened in around three years. There is only one way that particular graph is heading and that is a point where data is 100% of mobile handset usage. This will happen irrespective of whether the mobile carriers 'endorse' a MoIP facility on the handsets or not. Again, this is not bad news for the mobile carriers - it's just a pricing issue - and in many ways its good - the future doesn't look too good for Skype et alia.
We have been looking at ways of improving our wireless broad band offerings for many months now and haven't come up with anything at all and have watched as the various carriers 'adjust' their pricing continually downwards (as is always inevitable). It may well be the case that, after trying so hard for almost two years, we cease looking for ways of providing a sensible wireless broadband services in larger numbers and simply continue to provide services to our own users of other services as a 'single bill' convenience. That would be a great shame as it is a really useful service and we should have been able to make a success of it by now. However it appears to be a bridge too far for a company of our size and we have only persisted with it because if we ended that part of our relationship with Optus we would have to re-examine our overall strategy in terms of the future directions we might take - if only because other carriers would want more than just our wireless business to give us the sorts of rates we need.
Sometimes I regret blundering in to the Australian IT industry in the days before there was such a thing and then being too lazy to find some other career direction for the past 45+ years.
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