Telephony in general
has either been the front runner or has been keeping pace with all the
technological developments that are taking place around us. India has been no
exception to this. Some may argue that the average Internet surfing speeds in
India are way slower than the nations like Korea or Japan within Asia but this
is also the fact that if any sector in India that has seen the rapid growth and
the technological catch up, it is telecom sector. We have come far ahead from
where we started 20 years back post the privatization and liberalization of
this sector. However, this article is not about the past but about looking at
the future. In this article, I am sharing with you my views on what are the top
trends in telephony and what are the technologies that are past their prime and
losing market share
OTT applications or Over the Top applications (↑)
Applications like
Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Tango, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat and Hike are a
new norm. Nowadays people prefer to use WhatsApp and other IM services to
communicate. Newly launched voice calls on WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and other OTT voice
applications are definitely making an impact on telco revenues and taking away
a decent chunk of voice revenue. Better Internet bandwidth availability is
going to further spring up the usage of these apps.
Cloud Telephony and UC (↑)
The benefits like
increased flexibility, unified communication platforms, process integration,
RoI monitoring and decreased costs are encouraging businesses to abandon their
on premise PBX systems and switch to the hosted PBX and UC (unified
communications) systems. Cloud-based solutions and services will continue to
grow in the future and more companies will migrate their communications systems
to the cloud. This demand will further accelerate with better bandwidth access
to the retail customers, opening up of VoIP for business along-with the
improvement in Enterprise networks.
Mobile (↑)
Mobile usage in India
has been growing at an average of around 8 to 13% per annum in last 3 years
across various states and will continue to grow in double digits going ahead.
There might be a dip in growth of voice usage with the advent and penetration of
OTT services but the growth in internet consumption will drive the mobile usage
upwards. 60% of Internet users in India now access internet thru mobile and 80%
of new internet users are accessing Internet through mobile. What is driving
and will further drive growth is the rapidly increasing smartphone penetration
in India. With most of the companies rolling out 4G networks, the smartphone
penetration will only see further jump and give rise to many new use cases.
WebRTC (↑)
WebRTC stands for web
real-time communications. It is the emerging industry standard that allows you
to use the web browser for services like voice calling, video chat, and
peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing without the need of external plugins. WebRTC is
supported by all major web browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera)
and the number of unified communication vendors and business software
developers are adding WebRTC to their products which influence the demand for
this technology, especially among the enterprise market.
Payphones and Calling Cards (↓)
With the increased
penetration of mobile phones (80% tele-density in India), the usage of calling
cards and the number of visitors in payphone shops is consistently declining.
With further decline in prices of mobile phones in secondary and reuse
markets and increased penetration of OTT services, this will further
decline.
Fixed Line Telephones (↓)
Fixed line telephone
subscribers are continuously decreasing due to the increase of mobile device
penetration. Improved internet bandwidth, faster access and easy
deployment of mobile networks, mobiles are a more convenient alternative to the fixed line. With
further launch of 4G the fixed line subscriptions are only going to decline.
There isn't much hope as well unless companies re-advent and look to deploy
triple play aggressively to save fixed line subscriptions. The cost too will
play an important role here, both for operators as well as end consumers.
Please share your
opinion on this!
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