Telecom Lead India: Lost cumulative revenues due to OTT VoIP for telecoms will be $479 billion by 2020. This will be 6.9 percent of cumulative total voice revenues.
Ovum, in a latest research report, has warned that OTT VoIP will cost the global telecoms industry $479 billion in lost cumulative revenues by 2020, which represents 6.9 percent of cumulative total voice revenues.
Ovum says while over-the-top (OTT) VoIP services are not about to replace traditional telephony, they will have a marked impact on telcos’ revenues over the next eight years, according to Ovum. Forecasts from the global analyst firm reveal that
Though revenues continue to fall, voice traffic is shifting rather than collapsing. Targeted price increases are expected to be commonplace as operators try to maintain their revenues. Focus on creating cloud-oriented telephony apps, and efforts to maintain the relevance of telephone numbers will ensure that operators have a place in the future communications landscape.
“Where operators have seen voice telephony as a service without a future, they have chosen to compete on price in an effort to eke out any remaining revenues from the market,” said Jeremy Green, principal telecoms strategy analyst at Ovum.
The complete collapse of telephony revenues is not likely, but the long-term trend is towards a richer and more complex communications environment in which voice serves a different function and telephony plays a smaller role.
Users have been heavily influenced by their experiences with OTT players’ services, and now expect traditional operators to provide content, relationships, and history within a service, irrespective of device or access method. Ovum recommends that operators develop or deploy applications that link cloud services with telephony usage.
The major threat posed by OTT VoIP is that it weakens customers’ attachment to their telephone number and transfers their attachment to a new address. This may turn out to be a more significant factor than the direct impact on telephony revenues. Operators should use telephone numbers as the identifier and address for cloud-based services, allow customers to choose numbers that are relevant to them, and develop more application-to-person SMS applications.
