Sources of value in voice: Asking the right questions

In the last few weeks I've been doing a lot of work on voice communications (and messaging / video / context):

• I attended Enterprise Connect in Orlando discussing collaboration, UCaaS, cPaaS, WebRTC and related themes
• I spoke at a private workshop, for a Tier-1 operator group's communications-service internal experts team
• I've helped a client advise a strategy around the new European eCall in-vehicle emergency-call standard
• I've been writing a report on VoLTE adoption and impact, for my Future of the Network research stream published by STL Partners / Telco 2.0 (Subscribe! Link here)

A common, over-arching, theme is starting to form for me. The future sources of value in voice are all about SPs / vendors asking the right questions when they design new services and solutions.

Historically, most value in voice communications has come from telephony (Sidenote: voice is 1000 applications/functions. Phone calls are merely one of these). And in particular, the revenue has stemmed from answering the following:

• Who is calling?
• Where are they?
• Who is being called?
• Where are they?
• How long did they speak for?
• Plus (sometimes):
• When did they call?
• What networks were they on?
• Was the call high-quality? (drops, glitches etc)
• Is it an emergency?

This pretty much covers most permutations for ordinary phone calls: on-net/off-net, roaming, international and long-distance, fixed-to-mobile and so forth. 

Clearly, the answers to these questions are worth a lot of money: many billions of dollars. But equally clearly, they don't seem to be enough to protect the industry from competition and substitution from other voice-comms providers, or alternative ways of conducting conversations and transactions. As a result, voice telephony services are (mostly) being bundled as flat-rate offers into data-led bundles for consumers, or perhaps per-month/per-seat fees for unified comms (or SIP trunks) for business. 

In other words, current voice revenues are being delivered based on answering fewer questions than in the past. Unsurprisingly, this is not helping to defend the voice business.

The current "mainstream" telecoms industry seems to be focused only on adding a few more questions to the voice roster:

• Is it VoIP / VoLTE / VoWiFi? (Answer = sometimes, but "so what" for the customer?)
• Can we use it to drag through RCS? (Answer = No)
• How can we reduce the costs of implementation? (Answer = maybe NFV/cloud)
• Are there special versions for emergencies? (Answer = yes, eg MCPTT and eCall)
• Is there a role for CSPs in business UCaaS? (Answer = yes, but it's hard to differentiate against Microsoft, Cisco, RingCentral, Vonage and 100 others)
• What do we do about Amazon Echo? (Answer = "Errrrmmmm... chatbots?")

Given the huge expense and complexity involved in implementing IMS for VoLTE, many mobile operators have very little "bandwidth" left to think about genuine voice innovation, especially given wider emphasis on NFV. What limited resources are left may get squandered on RCS or "video-calling". 

Fixed and cable operators are in a slightly better position - they have long had hybrid business models partnering with PBX/UC vendors for businesses and can monetise various solutions, especially where they bundle with enterprise connectivity. For fixed home telephony, most operators have long viewed basic calls as a commodity, and are either protected by regulators via line-rental and emergency-call requirements, or can outsource provision to third parties.

In my view, there are many other questions that can be asked and answered - and that is where the value lies for the future of voice communications. None are easy to achieve, but then they wouldn't be valuable if they were:

• Why is the call occurring? (To buy something, ask a question, catch up with a friend, arrange a meeting or 100 other underlying purposes)
• Where is the call being made and received (physically)? For instance indoors, in a noisy bar, on a beach with crashing waves, in a car, in a location with eavesdroppers?
• Is the communication embedded in an app, website or business process? 
• Is the call part of an ongoing (multi-occasion) conversation or relationship?
• Is a "call" the right format, with interruptive ringing and no pre-announcement? Is a push-to-talk, one-way, "whisper mode", broadcast, team or other form more appropriate?
• Are both/all parties human, or is a machine involved as well?
• What device(s) are being used? (eg headset, car, wearable, TV, Echo, whiteboard?)
• Who gets to record the call, and own/delete/transcribe the recording?
• Are the call records secure, and can they be tampered with?
• What's the most effective style of the call? (Business-like, genial, brusque, get-to-the-point-quickly etc)
• What languages and accents are being spoken? Can these be adjusted for better understanding? What about background noise - is that helpful or hindering?
• Can the call add/drop other parties? Are these pre-arranged, or can they be suggested by the system in context?
• Are the participants displaying emotion? (Happiness, anger, eagerness, impatience, boredom etc) . How can this be measured, and if necessary, managed?
• Is there a role for ultrasound and/or data-over-sound signalling before or during the call?
• How can the call be better scheduled / postponed / rescheduled?
• Is a normal phone number the best "identifier"? What about a different number, or a social / enterprise / gaming / secure identity?
• Are there multiple networks involved/available for connection, or just one? What happens when there are multiple choices of access or transit providers? What happens where the last 10m is over WiFi or Bluetooth beyond the SP's visibility?
• Is encryption needed? Whose?
• What solutions are needed to meet the needs of specific vertical-markets or other user groups? (Banking, healthcare, hospitality, gaming etc)
• What are the desired/undesired psychological effects of the communications event? How can the user interface and experience by improved?
• Did the call meet the underlying objectives of all parties? How could a similar call be improved the next time?
• How do we track, monetise and bill any of this?

In my view it is these - and many other - questions that determines the real value of voice communications. Codec choice and network QoS are certainly useful, as is (sometimes) interoperability. Network coverage is clearly paramount for mobile communications. But these should not be put on a pedestal, above all the other ways in which value can be derived from something seemingly simple - people speaking to each other.

I'm seeing various answers to some of these questions - for example, contact-centre solutions seem to be most advanced on some of the emotional analysis, language-detection and other aspects. There are some interesting human-driven psychology considerations being built into new codec designs like EVS (eg uncomfortable silences between words). MVNOs and cPaaS players are doing cool things to "program" telephony for different applications and devices. The notion of "hypervoice" was a good start, but hasn't had the traction it deserved (link). Machine-learning is being applied to help answer some of these questions - most obviously with Alexa/Siri/Assistant voice products, but also behind the scenes in some UC and contact-centre applications.

But we still lack any consistent recognition that voice is "more than calls". 99% of effort still seems to go on "person A calls person B for X minutes". Very little is being done around intention and purpose - ask a CSP "Why do people make phone calls?" and most can't give a list of the top-10 uses for a "minute". Most people still use "voice" and "telephony" synonymously - a sure-fire indicator they don't understand the depth of possibility here. And we still get hung up on replacing voice with video (they have a Venn overlap, but most uses are still voice-centric or video-centric).

Until both the telco and traditional enterprise solutions marketplaces expand their views of voice (and entrench that vision among employees, vendors and partners), we should continue to expect Internet- and IoT-based innovators to accelerate past the humble, 140yr-old phone call. Start asking the right questions, and look for ways to provide answers.

Quick thoughts on MWC from afar

I'm not in Barcelona this week.

I stopped going to MWC a few years ago, when the hassle and costs involved started outweighing the benefits. One year I had 400 requests for meetings, and it took me a solid 2 weeks of email just to sort my diary. No more - I prefer smaller events, which have the added benefit of fewer "messages" being hammered into my skull by stressed marketing execs and their PR/AR minders.

But I am watching from afar, scanning Twitter and a few webcasts for nuggets of insight, from the comfort of my sofa, bed or local artisan coffee place.

A couple of quick observations so far:

• The most intriguing announcement is the Cisco/Ericsson blending of VoLTE and Cisco's Spark collaboration and messaging app (link). Although the PR is carrier-focused and around selling UCaaS, I suspect the real story is yet to come. Both companies also have close relationships with Apple and IBM. And I suspect that a future enterprise-centric solution could combine private (or virtual-private) mobile networks, optimised iPhone/iPad experience, maybe eSIM, Siri, Watson integration and more. Let's see if there's any different messaging, or more detail, at Enterprise Connect next month, the big UC/UCaaS shindig in Orlando. I'll be there, unlike MWC, as it gets the signal/noise ratio right. [Sidenote: if anyone at Ericsson or Cisco is now thinking "hmm, sounds interesting.... why haven't we thought of that?" then get in touch with me!]
• Nokia's reinvention continues. On its analyst/press webcast yesterday, it made a big deal about verticals and enterprise-related activities too. Utilities, transport, public sector and "webscale" companies were namechecked, including (again) private cellular either standalone or in partnership with classical MNOs. It also highlighted optical and IP networks (which came with the ALU acquisition) which was an interesting choice for a mobile event. Props to CEO Rajeev Suri for using "Webscale" instead of the pejorative "OTT": much more mature and inclusive language. 
• There's an awful of of 5G-washing going on, unsurprisingly, with plenty of references to its supposedly world-changing abilities. Governments and policymakers have all swallowed the 5G spin, without realising it's mostly just a pitch for more spectrum. Yet the GSMA head Mats Granryd talked in his keynote about 1.1 billion users in 2025. Given half of those (or more) are likely to be smartphones, that suggests that maybe 500m, at most, will be 5G IoT devices. Which, depending on your preferred overhyped forecast number, implies about 1-4% of the total IoT universe in 2025 - hardly the most indispensable enabler of the overall automated society of the future, nor an indicator that a spectrum monoculture policy is desirable. Doesn't suggest billions in new value from network-slicing capabilities, either. In a nutshell, 5G is important, but it's not the gamechanger many assert. Use the hashtag #5Gwash to call people out on it.
  
• The most-discussed new handset is HMD Global's new take on the classic Nokia 3310. As well as its retro looks, it sports a month-long battery, the Snake game, and a whole two (count 'em!) generations of cellular technology. That's right, it's a good-ole 2G GSM, calls+SMS device. Plus, it comes in a dual-SIM version. That's proper plastic SIMs, naturally, not this newfangled eSIM stuff. Sounds like a great backup device for 2-factor authentication when your main phone breaks or gets stolen.  
• GSMA published an eBook on "Messaging as a Platform" (link), tying its MaaP vision to RCS. There's a lot of generic stuff about chatbots, AI and "conversational commerce" in there, without explaining how it relates to a useless messaging service which isn't even a successful product, nor has any form of unifed API. Unless, as I suspect, it's aimed at making MNOs the distribution channel for Google's chat interface, Assistant and voice-recognition tools. Maybe there's a Google API / PaaS play to look forward to?  As I wrote last week, operators should ignore RCS and So-Called Advanced Messaging (yes, I like the acronym) and do more-relevant things instead. The same applies to contact-centre and multi-channel vendors: there are plenty of more-urgent things to look at. The GSMA's continued use of a Twitter SnapChat avatar points to the fact that platform status is earned not just imposed.
• The "official" announcement that Deutsche Telekom's immmr VoIP/messaging spin-off is using GenBand's Kandy cPaaS is interesting (link), although it was talked about informally last year at TADSummit (link). Looks like it's Internet/WebRTC-based and very much a good example of "post-IMS" mobile communications, with iOS and Android apps as well as browser access. No RCS nonsense visible, although I can imagine that DT's network-fundamentalist wing might have something to say about in future.

More MWC de-spinning if I get a chance over the next couple of days.

The rise of Managed Voice Infrastructure... or perhaps VIaaS or UCaaSaaS ?

Over the last year or so, I've watched the emergence of a new category of communication service - but it's quite hard to define a decent name for the trend.

In essence, it's where telcos/SPs offer some form of VoIP, either for consumer telephony or enterprise UC/hosted-PBX... but don't actually manage the infrastructure internally themselves. Instead, a vendor manages and delivers the capability via its own software/cloud-based platform. The SP sells (perhaps customising / integrating / bundling) the "outsourced" service to final end-users. It's not really the same as a straightforward channel play (eg resale of SaaS applications), because there's typically various network and OSS integration aspects, such as the need for SBCs, link with numbering and perhaps QoS, coupling with emerging NFV strategies etc.

The most prominent providers are probably:

• BroadSoft BroadCloud
• GenBand Nuvia
• Alianza Cloud Voice Platform
• Metaswitch MetaSphere Cloud Services

In addition to these, there are probably more that I'm not fully aware of. Alongside this, various other vendors are offering managed/hosted VoLTE, API/PaaS platforms and other applications (yes, even Jibe's hosted-RCS, now owned by Google) also intended to be offered through SP channels.

But for me, the main event here is service providers outsourcing their "core" telephony functions - including business-oriented comms which typically go beyond just voice - to vendor-controlled cloud platforms.

If you take the view that it's too difficult for SPs to develop their own innovative and differentiated consumer-voice or UCaaS platforms, then the next question is whether they really add any value by deploying their own servers for somebody else's application either. This is especially true for "vanilla" applications like PSTN telephony, SIP trunking and basic hosted-PBX functionality.

The answer is probably one of scale, risk-appetite, and the ability and willingness to attract software developers - as well as the target audience of end-users that a given SP faces. Larger operators ought to be able to have the resources to develop unique and well-customised propositions, even if they are based on a vendor's application platform or straightforward standardised telephony functions. 

Smaller providers - especially in rural areas - may find the idea of such hosted/wholesale offers more intriguing, especially as the cost-models may allow then to phase in such products over time without heavy upfront investmentment. 

In developing countries, the initial user-base for UCaaS might be very low as well - especially if broadband infrastructure is still being built-out and adopted by small businesses. Again, a wholesale offer might make sense, assuming the data-centres are close enough and long-haul links suitable.

There may also be a fixed/mobile divide here - it could be argued that residential fixed/cable operators have better things to focus on than infrastructure for delivering a commodity telephone service that few people use. Or, perhaps, mobile-centric operators may not have the ability and willingness to deal with the hybrid fixed/mobile nature of most UCaaS.

I think we're still at early stages here. Vendors are mostly being quite cautious, to avoid looking as if they compete with their SP customers, or are taking too much of the available profit-pool in that sector. Yet as NFV matures, both telephony and UCaaS do start to look a bit more like today's other SaaS offers - which can be hosted in telcos' own data-centres, but are more often anchored in Microsoft's or Amazon's.

It's also hard to come up with a pleasing category-name for this. Some people have suggested "wholesale telephony", but that's too closely-similar to various other traditional bits of the wholesale/transit market. "White-label voice & UC" is another option, but I've spoken to some people who recoil from that. "Cloud voice" can apply to about a dozen separate intersections of communications and cloud, so is too vague in my view. For the business side, I quite like UCaaSaaS but that's too much of a mouthful, although it looks fun on screen.

Maybe "VIaaS"? Voice-Infrastructure as a Service? Or my current favourite: MVI, Managed Voice Infrastructure? Some will grumble that it makes the video and messaging/collaboration bits look like second-class citizens, but I think it perhaps captures the essence of what's occurring - and it also spans both consumer VoIP telephony and UCaaS.

No, VoLTE is not the future of mobile voice

I've lost count of the articles and presentations I've seen recently, loudly proclaiming that VoLTE represents "The Future of Mobile Voice", or worse, "Allows telcos to compete against [so-called] OTTs". The run-up to MWC is likely to generate even more breathless and gushing tributes of this type.

But this is all nonsense. VoLTE is most definitely NOT the future of mobile voice. It's just the past of mobile telephony, with a lick of very expensive IP paint.

(It goes without saying that VoWiFi, RCS & ViLTE aren't the future of mobile comms either. See here for a full explanation, and watch out for another post soon).

VoLTE is still just "boring old phone calls", billed per minute, with interruptive caller-to-recipient ringing, based on E.164 numbers, with no customisation for purpose or context or sense-making. HD audio and embedding calls in apps via APIs aren't new either - they work for circuit calls too. Not only that, but VoLTE doesn't work very well - Amdocs recently providing evidence that calls drop far more frequently now. 

It's also hugely expensive and complex to implement, and in most cases different VoLTE networks don't interoperate, as they're all slightly different. The GSMA has even given a special acronym to its bug-fixing squad - now called VIRTUE (VoLTE Interoperability Resolution Expediting Task Force) - link here.

There are only two real purposes for VoLTE: supporting calls on 4G-only networks, and hopefully reclaiming some 2G/3G spectrum. Worthy, but not "the future". VoLTE will not increase telephony usage. Yes, faster call setup, better indoor coverage (4G or WiFi) and clearer HD might slow the decline a little, but neither are exactly groundbreaking. Fixed PSTN call setup has been instantaneous since the 1980s, and HD-quality voice has been available on both 3G networks and 3rd-party VoIP apps for years. VoLTE is arriving very late to the party, with a bottle of cheap supermarket lager, just as the cool people are heading somewhere else for champagne and whisky.


Peak Mobile Telephony

This is because telephony is yesterday's news, even mobile telephony. Looking around the world, many countries are past the point of "peak telephony", when adding together volumes of fixed+mobile outbound calls. Quite a few are now past "peak mobile telephony" as well, although others are still substituting fixed for mobile, as prices fall because of competition. 

Even those with growing overall call usage are seeing this driven by increasing numbers of users not usage per person, for example in India, where few people had phones at all in the past. Sometimes there's a blip of pent-up demand when flat-rate plans come into the market, or there's a recovery from an economic crash, but that's a one-off gain, not sustained growth.

But the simple fact of the matter is that once people have access to phones & (cheap) calls, there's a limit to how much they want to use. Use-cases are eroded by email, messaging, video communications, social networks, app-based interactions, notifications and the 100 other ways of connecting people and computers - even before WebRTC's help in accelerating the trend. 

There are, simply, better ways of doing almost anything than via a normal phone call.

This is already exhibited by usage trends, before we've even started the main part of this transition period. For example:

• The CTIA's annual survey reported a drop of 6.2% in US mobile voice-call minutes from 2013 to 2014, despite a broad shift to flat-rate plans and a 6% increase in the number of subscriptions. A similar fall in 2015 seems plausible.
• China Mobile did the same number of voice-calling minutes (1.60trn) in Q3'2015 as it did in Q3'2012, despite growing its customer base from 699m to 823m over the same period. That's a 15% decline in average use in three years. (Link)
• In the UK, EE has recently reported average minutes-of-use falling 4.4% year-on-year on average - and 8.6% for postpaid users.
• France bucks the trend - it has seen mobile telephony usage rise consistently, although that's perhaps because more competition from Free (and lower prices) has driven elasticity in usage. The chart on p32 here indicates that growth is flatter, though

In business telephony & UCaaS, there are mixed reports of growth by company, vertical and user role. But if you take out pre-arranged dial-ins to conference bridges (not really a "call" as such), the picture isn't pretty either.

In short, mobile telephony is (or has) peaked. I use fewer minutes per month on my phone than last year, and I bet you do as well. Upgrading to VoLTE won't change that, especially if it's less reliable.

When was the last time you phoned for a taxi, or called someone to invite them to a birthday party? Unless you work in telesales, how often do you use your phone - desk or mobile - to call a client or industry contact? How often do you scowl or tut, when your phone rings unexpectedly and distracts your concentration?

Phone calls won't disappear, no. But then there's plenty of fax machines still around, too.

More importantly still, if demand is falling or flat, while supply of telephony or near-substitutes is rising, the only economic outcome is falling prices. The revenue attributable to voice telephony is falling, even if volumes are holding up.

The painful fact is that telcos don't do "voice" in a general sense. They only do telephony, with an occasional side-order of voicemail, conferencing and push-to-talk. They are almost entirely absent from the 100s (soon to be 1000s) of other voice applications and use-cases. 


VoLTE is misnamed. It's just ToLTE. 

What else is there in voice besides phone calls? 

How about voice chat, asynchronous voice, speech-to-text, recording, real-time translation, priority voice, voice recognition, voice biometrics, voice messaging, stereo audio, aid for the blind, peer-to-peer, realtime captioning, voice PaaS, emergency group voice, gunshot detection, nurse-call functions, radio, virtual assistants, emotional analysis, karaoke, encrypted voice, hypervoice, IoT integration - and so on. 

Those are not phone calls, not billed (or measured) per-minute, not necessarily using phone numbers, often not subject to lawful interception, not regulated - but they are huge sources of current and potential value. But they need thought and innovation, not blind standards.

Then add in the whole rapidly-inflating universe of contextual communications and analytic/metadata-enriched voice, and you start to get the full picture. I'll cover intersections with machine-learning and IoT another time. Telephony is Alexander Graham Bell's view of voice communications, not the 21st century's. (Obviously, regulators and governments are even slower than telcos to work this out, though). 

(A couple of telcos have tried updating VoLTE to pre-announce why people are calling. Good idea, badly implemented. A topic for another post. Hint: blame RCS).

The voice-based service that's currently got the most buzz? No, not Skype or Viber or Whatsapp or any of the UC vendors. It's Amazon Echo and its Alexa virtual assistant. Echo has been around for a while, but in the last month or two everyone seems to have suddenly started creating integrations and cool services. "Alexa, get me an Uber", "Alexa, play Lady Gaga's Telephone on Spotify". Or, ironically, "Alexa, send my calls to voicemail", by innovative VoIP provider Ooma (link).

Add that to Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana and Google Now, plus assorted other virtual assistants that are becoming the true face of future mobile (or fixed) voice communications. It will be (in part) about input/output and access to information. Not upgrading the string between two tin-cans to IP.

There's an upcoming conference on Mobile Voice in a couple of months. There are no mobile operators or even VoLTE vendors on the draft speaking roster. Ironically, the only CSP represented is cable operator Comcast. Forget the upcoming dinosaur exhibition in Barcelona - this is where the new mobile voice DNA is being developed. 

The obsession with VoLTE is just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Or creating an IP-powered horse buggy in the age of the car. Create your own analogy - there's plenty of examples of "missing the wood for the trees".


VoLTE is retro

In fact, perhaps the best analogy for VoLTE is the new-shape VW Beetle introduced in 1997, which took a lot of styling clues from the classic car made from 1938 onwards, updated for the modern era. It perpetuated a decades-old model, but with an underlying change in platform. It evolved from rear-engine/RWD, to front-engine/FWD - the equivalent of moving from TDM to IP in terms of phone calls. It still had 4 wheels, it was still internal-combustion, it was still sold via normal dealerships and distribution, and was financed in the usal ways. However, it was more complex and expensive than its predecessor.

While the New Beetle clearly fitted a market demand, and has been moderately successful, in hindsight it was not a game-changer in any way. It didn't represent the "future of cars". It hasn't been a blockbuster, let alone the "people's wagon". It was an up-to-date retro take on an old classic. The original Beetle sold about 21m units in 54 years. The New Beetle sold just 1m in its first 10 years to to 2008, and (with another refresh in 2012) it will probably do about the same in the next 10 years. People think it's quite cute, but it holds nowhere near the universal appeal of the original.

(I'd perhaps contrast the Beetle with the new Mini, which has spawned lots of different variants and now seems almost as iconic as the original 1950s Issigonis classic. Or perhaps another car analogy VoLTE should have emulated is the Porsche 911, which has continued to evolve incrementally for decades - it keeps the family resemblance, but is always fresh. And I'm not even going to invoke Tesla, Toyota Priuses, Google self-drive cars, car-club business models and other innovations).


Summary

VoLTE is the right answer, 7 years too late. It should have been part of LTE at launch on Day 1, designed-in and standardised during Year Minus-3. The industry forgot about it, and has been in panicky catch-up mode ever since, trying to shoehorn immature packet voice onto a complex new air-interface and core network. The focus has been on network QoS, standards and spectrum re-farming, rather than communications purpose, user-experience, analytics, devices or applications. The word "acoustic" didn't even appear in the original IR92 specifications.

It's too little, too late. It's a IP-homage to ye olde phone networkes of yore, not a shiny vision of the future of communications. Yes, we'll likely see continued growth in VoLTE deployments, with vendors making some money, while telco engineering departments look "busy" and justify their existence and budgets. 

Instead of putting R&D efforts in, hiring people who understand speech and behaviour, educating regulators, experimenting with new capabilities and models, or learning from other innovators, we get a group of people titled "head of voice" who mostly seem confused by the lack of Bakelite and rotary dials. And vendors happy to entrench the confirmation bias.

Try an experiment over the next month, especially at MWC: Mentally replace the word "voice" with "telephony" wherever you see or hear it. (Or replace VoLTE with ToLTE). It could be in press releases, CEO speeches, booth demos, business-card job titles, analyst research reports, Tweets or whatever. 

If voice/telephony makes no difference to the sentence's meaning, then that person or company simply doesn't get it. They're not the future of mobile voice - they're the past. They're telco equivalents of VW marketeers, with equally dodgy stats and polluting emissions.

Decoding T-Mobile's WiFi-Calling and VoLTE stats

A quick analytical post. I'm currently re-doing my WebRTC model for service provider use-cases, and as part of that I'm looking at data on adoption of VoLTE, WiFi-calling and other services/applications.

T-Mobile US is interesting as it's revealed various data-points over the past couple of years:

• 2007 - original launch of UMA-based WiFi calling, notably on BlackBerry
• May 2014 (link) - VoLTE launch, although the acquired MetroPCS had had a limited deployment since 2012
• June 2014 (link) - 17m WiFi-calling enabled devices, with "almost 5m" WiFi calling users (including older UMA/GAN). The user base quoted is monthly average users (MAU)
• July 2014 (link) - total of 52m VoLTE calls made
• December 2014 (link) - 19.2m VoLTE calls per day & 6.6m WiFi calls per day
• March 2015 (links here & here) -  7m WiFi calling users per month, 7.6m WiFi calls per day, 10% of calls on VoLTE
• October 2015 (link) c12m WiFi calls per day
• November 2015 (link) - a third of calls on VoLTE

Now, consider a few other data points. According to various surveys, a typical US mobile user makes/receives 6-7 calls per day. And T-Mobile had 61.2m subscribers at end-Q3.

That implies that T-Mobile US carries around 400m calls per day, assuming its users are fairly similar in usage pattern to AT&T & Verizon. (Note that the US quotes statistics including both inbound and outbound calls, in contrast to most other operators/countries which just count outbound)

In other words, only about 3% of T-Mobile's calls use WiFi calling. Put another way, VoLTE is 10x larger, despite being launched much more recently. And T-Mobile US has been by far the longest, largest proponent of WiFi calling, for more than 8 years, in both IMS and pre-IMS variants. The number is growing, as new devices support WiFi calling, but it's still a relatively small part of the total.

Also, looking at the user numbers, it seems probable that T-Mo is now on perhaps 10-11m MAUs for WiFi calling. But that's monthly - and those people collectively make more than 2 billion calls per month. So even among those users, only around 17% of calls are on WiFi - which makes sense as many will be using their phones outside their homes/offices.

To reconcile the numbers, it's probably better to think of perhaps 2m regular daily users, accounting for perhaps 8m calls per day, plus maybe another 8-9m per month whose phones switch to WiFi calling occasionally - perhaps in poor-coverage areas, or while travelling. The regular users will likely be those with poor coverage at home.

What does all this mean? In a nutshell, it suggests that WiFi calling is less of a big deal than many think - and is primarily a customer-retention tool for operators with in-building network limitations. It's not (currently) a meaningful source of voice traffic offload. 

3% of calls and 3% of subscribers as regular users, for the most-aggressive operator pushing the technology, is not hugely impressive. By contrast, the adoption of VoLTE has been surprisingly rapid, although the stats are possibly skewed a bit by high-end/telephony-heavy users.

It also implies that many operators may well not bother with full IMS-powered WiFi calling, instead taking a path towards using separate VoIP (or video) apps such as Orange Libon or Telefonica Tuenti Mobile. In particular, these "secondary" apps can offer a different experience to ordinary phone-calls from the native dialler, especially with WebRTC as a more flexible enabler/platform than IMS.

It's also worth noting that T-Mobile is starting to push its new 3G/4G small cell ("CellSpot") for people with poor coverage, which may mean that some users actually reduce their reliance on WiFi for calls at home or in small offices. (link)

Some of the comments I heard at yesterday's WiFi Now conference in Amsterdam seem over-hyped. I'm yet to be convinced that many enterprises will open up their private WiFi networks for carrier VoWiFi in large numbers, in particular.

So overall, I expect IMS-based WiFi calling to continue growing, especially in markets that have high numbers of calls-per-subscriber, plus variable-quality coverage indoors, or for operators with limited sub-1GHz coverage. Maybe, with Herculean and very expensive efforts, a few operators might reach the 10% mark for calls carried over WiFi. And that's only if they get all phones auto-provisioned, they work with enterprises and venues to integrate WiFi calling with in-house WiFi, and don't push hard on small cells or LTE-U.

Meanwhile, the overall market for "boring old phone calls" will continue to drop regardless. Yes, if WiFi-calling can be added cheaply and easily then it's a useful "maintenance" enhancement of legacy telephony. But it's not a substitute for (or component of) proper innovation around voice, video, WebRTC and contextual communiations. That needs to be the strategic priority, not window-dressing for a few percentage points on a decades-old service.

Disruptive Analysis publishes research & does private consulting/workshops, as well as conference speeches, on areas such as WiFi calling, VoLTE, WebRTC and next-generation voice/video/messaging applications. It has covered the convergence between WiFi and VoIP since 2003. Please contact information AT disruptive-analysis DOT com for more information.

A few thoughts on the IIT RTC conference

Last week I attended the Illinois Institute of Technologyconference on Realtime Communications. I enjoyed it immensely – not a huge event (maybe 150-200 or so people, spread across various tracks), but a really good mix of attendees and topics. As well as WebRTC and cloud communications, it covered more general aspects of IP voice, IoT networks and applications, a touch of 5G, and quite a lot on public safety / NG911. Quite a bit of technology, but also a decent focus on use-cases and business. And well-curated to avoid obvious corporate pitches, even by sponsors.

There were many of the “usual suspects” for WebRTC, VoIP & APIs there – among them Chad Hart, Tim Panton, Emil Ivov, Alan Quayle, Dan Burnett, Ivelin Ivanov, Andy Abramson, Vladimir Beloborodov, Robin Raymond and James Body. But there was also a good representation of service providers (eg Comcast), and major IT/enterprise comms vendors with WebRTC leanings, including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Avaya & Unify, plus assorted smaller developers (for a mini TadHack hackathon), academics and students from IIT, and a few industry veterans like Henning Schulzrinne (former FCC CTO) and Richard Shockey (SIP Forum). Google participated remotely (especially on the topic of ORTC), and GenBand was also there in force, with its Kandy bus outside for a day.

I did a general presentation on the WebRTC market status (there’s now more than 100m active users, various new use-cases, and 20+ service provider deployments – more details soon). I also moderated a panel on contextual communications (with Tim, Ivelin & Santhana from GenBand), and participated in one with Henning about the evolution of “identifiers” and especially the future role of the phone number. I picked up a lot of new insights into areas such as WebRTC+IoT (more soon), the state-of-the-art for mobile WebRTC implementation, and the technical/regulatory/financial challenges of future forms of public safety networks and emergency communications.

A couple of quick thoughts I’ll expand on in other posts or reports in coming weeks:

• IBM made a great point about using IoT events to trigger a separate WebRTC communications session, eg a temperature sensor in a machine kick-starting a video/audio session, when it hits a threshold
• The fragmented nature of US emergency communications tells me that while 911/NG911 will remain as “lowest common denominator”, we will see various other higher-level emergency apps on smartphones for particular uses. Ideally, there would be an emergency API that developers could use inside any mobile app, as well as having support for the native dialler
• Interesting presentation & ideas by Thomas Howe about the use of automated interaction with businesses via SMS (see just justkisst.me) 
• Great presentation from Chris Rezendes about IoT - using the fascinating example of water metering/monitoring, also also asserting the resurgence of SMEs
• As we go towards 5G (& also SDN), we’re seeing another attempt at defining “quality classes” in networks – but what is the right “level of abstraction” to encourage app-developers to be interested in network performance? And do developers actually want to ask for certain QoS levels (or even pay for it)? There seems to be a good argument that developers want to have something like a “network status API” that allows them to manage variable network conditions, rather than necessarily ask for specific quality or assurances.

I also did an interview with NoJitter during the event, about contextual comms - there's a great write-up by Beth Schultz here.

I go to a lot of good events, but I have to say that overall this was one of my favourites when it comes to understanding “what’s next?” in communications, without an overdose of corporate spin. In some ways it reminded me of the old and much-missed eComm conferences. 

Many thanks to the organisers - I’ll definitely be back next year, especially as Chicago is such a great city to hang out in for an extra couple of days. (The picture below is one of mine taken from the lake with #nofilter, as Instagram would say)