A new report by Marina Lu, research associate and Jake Saunders (pictured), vice-president for forecasting, ABI Research concludes that "Mobile operators are increasingly coming under pressure to improve mobile telecom service profit margins as well as bring in new services to counter the competition from Over the Top (OTT) services such as Skype, Viber, Whatsapp, and FaceTime [see "AT&T will Block Facetime/3G to non Shared Data Plan Customers" - here]"."In 2Q 2012, minutes of use showed the greatest declines compared to 2011 in Asia-Pacific (-7.36%), Africa (-6.3%), Western Europe (-2.32%), and North America (-2.12%) .. “Messages Sent” is keeping stable in Q2 2012 compared to last quarter .. mobile data traffic continues its rapid increase with 13.4 Exabytes to be consumed through 2012".
"Mobile operators have had limited options with 3G but 4G LTE should give the mobile operators some new tools .. LTE does not just transform the delivery of broadband data, it also can enrich voice services. SK Telecom, Korea’s largest operator, launched out the world’s first VoLTE services on 8 August, 2012. More recently, LG U+ in South Korea and MetroPCS Communications in the US [see "MetroPCS will Use Amdocs for VoLTE QoS" - here] have also introduced Voice over LTE".
“For voice communications, VoLTE enables rich media content to be overlaid over voice, while the packetized delivery of the voice data allows for greater cost of service savings”.
See "Carriers Relying on Voice over LTE Services to Improve Margins as Traditional Minutes of Use Decline" - here.
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Given that VoLTE won't be mainstream until at least 2014, I'm not convinced by this at all.
ReplyDeleteMost people expect LTE penetration outside US, Korea & Japan to still be <40% by 2016, so even if (unlikely) all LTE users have VoLTE it's going to still be servicing only a minority of the voice/messaging market.
In addition, I don't think VoLTE is designed to support all the new types of voice communication that will emerge in the next few years. We'll have widespread use of capabalities like WebRTC by 2016, changing a lot of voice usage from service to "function".
If the operator community is reliant on VoLTE to deliver new revenue (rather than just add new cost), they are going to be disappointed. VoLTE is a "hygiene factor" for continuation of legacy telephony, not a platform for differentiation.
Dean Bubley
@disruptivedean