Reading about the future of mobile VoIP on VoIPPlanet triggered my thought process about the interesting possibilities for mobile firms. Given the advantages of 3G, 3G VoIP drawing more users than VoIP on Wi-Fi is a no-brainer. But this offers interesting opportunities for mobile firms, which are worried about losing revenues to VoIP.
Mobile firms need to accept that voice would not be the major revenue earner for them, it would be data. With unlimited voice plans and Google making its intentions clear about the voice space, this may happen in not a very distant future. What the telcos have is the (almost) unlimited reach and the penetration, which is difficult to replicate in a short period of time. The use of VoIP is inevitable and hence instead of trying to stop it, it would instead make more sense for the telcos to find ways to make the best of it.
One option would be to enable and promote VoIP on the 3G networks so that users can leverage that to make more VoIP calls and thus increase the data usage for the mobile companies. Common sense suggests that the VoIP route would be taken for expensive (read international) calls. Even today most of these expensive calls are made using calling cards or computers, thus preventing the mobile firms to benefit from this opportunity. By offering VoIP on their networks, the mobile firms would also be able to compete effectively with new technologies like WiMax as then the users would not have a strong enough reason to switch.
This is the classic example of marketing myopia, where firms take actions to maximize their short term gains and define their markets very narrowly. The mobile companies need to define their business as mobile communication and not only communication using mobiles. If the mobile companies continue to charge those obnoxious rates for voice or define their markets as only, users would find alternate solutions to make those calls and thus prevent any earnings for the mobile companies.
This article has been written by our VoIP news editor Alok Saboo. Alok is pursuing his PhD in Marketing at the Pennsylvania State University.
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