“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.
