Almost 70% of telcos in Asia Pacific believe mobile broadband users will no longer pay for voice and text services within four years. According to a recent joint Telecom Asia-Ovum survey, 26% of those polled see that happening in two years and 42% think it will take three to four years.
"We always knew the voice/messaging revenue opportunity was a time bomb - now we have an idea of the timeframe in which operators must seriously visit the future of voice and messaging revenue within their business models," says Nicole McCormick, senior analyst at Ovum.
Increasingly, voice and messaging for postpaid users is already being offered on an unlimited basis by operators in Asia, putting the onus on operators to encourage data usage and to ensure an easy up-sell path for customers to higher tiered data plans.
This year we asked how mobile operators should position themselves against competition from OTT messaging and mobile VoIP players such as Line, Kakao Talk and Whatsapp.
Common sense seems to have prevailed for the most part. The majority (45%) believe operators should "compete minimally and collaborate" against such OTT players. McCormick notes that the vast majority of Asian operators don't have the resources to out-compete and out-innovate the agile OTT operators and their deep pockets.
But 34% indicated that they should "complete aggressively and collaborate" while 16% think they should only collaborate (as access provider).
Quality of service (QoS) was once again considered the most important differentiator in the mobile broadband sector. But QoS, while topping the survey on differentiation, garnered just 29% of the vote this yet - down significantly from 37% last year. Speed was a close second, with 27% of respondents considering it a key differentiator (see chart above).