Telecom network operators will lose $14 billion in revenues in 2014, a 26 percent increase compared to 2013, due to voice and messaging traffic by OTT players such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Skype.
Juniper Research said mobile operator’s voice revenues fell to less than 60 percent of their value five years’ ago in a number of telecom markets including Italy, Spain and the U.K.
Last week, Vodafone India CEO Marten Pieters demanded OTT vendors such as Facebook, WhatsApp etc should share benefits they derive from customers for carrying their data and content on telecom networks.
A combination of IM, VoIP and social media substitution was primarily responsible, resulting in lost revenues and additional costs due to the scale of signaling traffic.
However, telecom operators will have new revenue streams with the potential to deliver cumulative revenues in excess of $66 billion over the next five years. The resulting revenues could more than offset the decline from core service revenues on an annual basis by 2018.
Windsor Holden of Juniper Research said: “In areas such as M2M (Machine to Machine) and mobile money, operators can achieve a substantial revenue uplift by focusing on full service provision rather than simple connectivity.”
The Juniper Research report recommended that operators implement direct carrier billing to retain a foothold in the lucrative mobile content space, and that they enhance their analytics packages to monetize consumer big data.
Without optimization, mobile data delivery costs will increase by more than three times over the next three years.
Implementation of NFV (Network Functionality Virtualization) solutions offers telecom operators the potential both of cost savings on proprietary hardware and on reducing product time-to-market.
Operators can boost core revenues by introducing higher-value shared data plans or by bundling content into a monthly subscription.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
