Fighting back! New Telco-OTT strategies

Dean Bubley of Disruptive Analysis, who is sometimes critical of the traditional telco ways, actually defines the path to play in this market and highlights the existing initiatives taken by operators already.

A short excerpt from his recent report says “Disruptive Analysis contends that operators need to launch their own Internet-based OTT offers and decouple the link between selling access connectivity and providing higher-level communications or content services.”

This approach is consistent with a number of emerging initiatives and exactly a part of what has been proposed under the “Mobile Cloud Services” strategy. 

T-Mobile’s WiFi calling is an example of such a service.

In response to a recent article in The Verge on how IP calling will change the phone industry, T-Mobile’s Director of Product Management recently said “We couldn’t agree more that the evolution of IP communications has fundamentally changed the way we communicate. Accordingly, in the future you will continue to see T-Mobile include Wi-Fi Calling as a feature on the vast majority of our smart phones. As a pure play wireless company, we will continue to leverage and embrace the power of IP communications to bring seamless, cost-effective connections to consumers across networks and devices.”

In the short term – this means that operators are making a move to compete with OTT players, and VoWiFi is just one of the ways they can move in that direction. In the long term – VoLTE and RCS are going to be increasingly more global/mainstream services as the network evolves.