The traditional telephony format for voice is at the end of its life. Synchronous voice communication is being substituted by asynchronous text and picture messaging. Industry initiatives like VoLTE and RCS offer little new value. Premium margins are rapidly eroding due to regulation, competition and arbitrage from ‘over the top’ (OTT) service providers.
Given that voice is the historical bedrock of the telecoms industry, this implies a major turning point is upon us. The familiar technical and economic structures of circuit voice are corroding and dissolving. In their place, new delivery systems and business models are emerging. A new ‘post-telephony’ era is beginning, which opens up a whole new realm of opportunity.
This implies great transformations in the voice market:
- Traditionally, voice has been an expensive product with a few over-priced service features. Telephony service providers need to radically lower their delivery cost structure, and find new kinds of value-added service to re-invigorate their neglected voice product line.
- Rather than see voice as a threat, broadband service providers need to embrace the existence of ‘over the top’ application, and create fit-for-purpose connectivity. Where this access is both managed and assured, there is new value that users will pay for.
- Voice conversations are a form of cheap raw material to feed the cloud economy. Online service providers need to embrace voice as a peer of text. Once voice is suitably contextualised, indexed, and made searchable, it can enable new forms of interaction and workflow.
This is an unsettling time for voice service providers. It is also one of great opportunity for those bold enough to search for better ways of solving user communications needs. Voice is the quintessential human means of communication, and voice-based communication services will be with us for as long as we retain the desire to speak.
We can help
You are warmly invited to get in touch to explore the drivers of user value for voice, as well as key future enabling technologies: going off-network with ‘telco-OTT’ services; extending web integration with WebRTC; polyservice network technologies; new voice-based customer contact services; and raising productivity using Hypervoice.
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