Frances continues, “However, despite the continued growth of VoIP and the recent new entrants to the market, mobile voice and messaging revenues remain at record levels globally.
So what does all this mean? A user who subscribes to a chosen mobile network operator (MNO) can call anyone on any network, anywhere, at any time – fixed or mobile. Global interconnectivity is guaranteed. There is no need to find out which network the recipients are on before calling them. Nor if they are available or online.
Proprietary VoIP, however, is a completely different environment. Yes, calls are free, but contacts have to be on the same network otherwise the proprietary nature of each of the VoIP networks won’t allow users to interconnect. A real problem. Closed user groups (i.e. family and friends) can, of course, all agree to be on the same network at the same time, but what about consumer to business traffic? Businesses don’t want to limit their contact bases and therefore dismiss large portions of their target audiences.
Step up “interconnectivity” – this word has been used in the telecoms industry for a long time, but not so much in the VoIP arena. More than a word, it’s an “enabler”. It means the potential exists for MNOs to start sharing services and make personalised services available wherever the caller is and whatever network the caller is on; in other words, ‘Service Broking’.
“With the ever increasing transition window from TDM to all-IP and the plethora of stove pipe service layer platforms out there continuing to grow, MNOs are now waking up to the fact that they can do much more when applying interconnectivity and service broking to new and future business concepts, as well as extending the portfolio of services offered to their own subscribers today,” said Graham Francis, marketing manager at OpenCloud. “Bringing this all back to skype and proprietary VoIP protocols, MNOs have the opportunity now to build services with global reach and use the standards based nature of telecom networks and protocols to extend these services to all users. Maybe then we will see the true weakness of networks built upon proprietary protocols.”