Does Voice have a Future?

There has been a lot of talk in recent years about the demise of voice…..mostly due to the combination of the incredible growth of messaging and the new ‘Generation Text’.  Anyone who wants to reach Generation Text knows that they won’t even listen to their voicemails!

Mobile operators have been concerned about the drop in voice usage and the future of voice.  But then, along comes video…and the game changes again.

Game changers like YouTube, Skype and Facetime that mesh video and messaging with voice are emerging as the new opportunities.  In fact, Facebook’s incredibly successful IPO really demonstrates how multimedia is central to the ‘social graph’, mapping people and the connections they have, to everything they care about.

The New Era

Among the most exciting aspects of the new voice era are…. the new and enhanced voice, video, and messaging services that will become available.  Some examples are Multi-Screen for users to receive seamless service across multiple connected devices, Group Collaboration as consumers and enterprises are enabling new collaboration tools and Share and Cloud Storage of conversations and user‑generated content that frees the user from network or device dependencies.

Across the world, operators have worked on the creation of complex heterogeneous networks from multiple major infrastructure vendors in a myriad of different and challenging geographical locations. This is designed to help deliver and improve the services used by some six billion connections worldwide.

The new voice network has to ensure convergence across the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), existing networks and open web services to drive innovation.  An example of new capabilities is Single-number call routing  which is improved network intelligence across multiple domains and making “one number” services much easier and cheaper to deploy in a converged environment – be it Voice over WiFi, VoIP over HSPA, or VoLTE.

The other factor in the future of Voice is how Open Networks will enable innovative developers to use Open APIs to leverage the network’s core assets and develop new differentiating applications like presence, location, or user information.  There will be new ways to merge voice, video and messaging that will provide services, we haven’t even thought of yet!

The Mobile Operators that are deploying new voice network services and incorporating these opportunities know that voice has a real future…..just ask Generation ‘Social’.