Both Analysys and Silicon.com have articles on how’s there’s still more growth in the wireless, cellular, mobile, call it what you like, market place. Voice services account for 80% of revenue and providers should stop worrying so much about data, as there’s still a ton of people using landlines when they could be using mobiles.
Both articles go on to talk about how 3G is going to be the start of the revolution (haven’t we heard that before) with people dumping their landlines in favour of mobile phones. Now I’ve had a few friends who’ve dumped their landlines as they only used the mobile, which is fine. However, certain other service, such as ADSL, require a landline to work. So I can’t see people totally ditching their landlines. But I could see people making less and less voice calls on the landline.
I’m probably one of those people, I have a home line, plus a mobile, I use the mobile to make most of my calls even when home. Besides we already know that BT’s traditional market place is shrinking, which is why they’re moving into services. It’s also been known for a long time that telco’s like BT made very little money from the residential market place, whereas businesses spent a fortune on voice.
The stumbling block at the moment is cost. Mobile calls are still to high, focus is often given in business to money wasted on mobile calls when there’s a landline sitting there. The cost of call minutes is very low at the moment and using a landline makes business sense, as the costs are so low.
It’s clear that mobile voice has much less than 50% of the total voice market at this point in time, with forecasts saying it’ll reach 50% by 2009. But if 3G usage is to hit 27m by the end of 2005, there’s obviously even more growth required to hit 50% of all voice calls. It’s my view that for the market place to be even split between mobile and fixed, the cost of mobile calls has just got to drop, so that they are somewhere near equal. Azeem’s blog has a piece on the correct price for voice calls with comments suggesting that VOIP calls should be the same as email (zero). VOIP brings another technology to the party which may eat into the traditional voice market more than mobile and that’s another storey.
