At our Future of Voice Masterclass in London next Thursday, myself and Dean Bubley will be covering how new Google-like business models can re-shape the market for voicemail. When we presented the same ideas at our California event last week, they generated plenty of interest and debate.
The timing is rather appropriate given how voicemail is rather in the news for the wrong reasons.
The proximate reasons are easy to see. The product and processes around voicemail are insecure. The service is easily prone to attack from both the technical and human perspective. Ordinary human motivations to pry and profit easily overcome moral qualms about such intrusion.
There are, however, much deeper issues going on around the vertical integration of the transport of voice, and the separate application we call 'telephony'. (This process of fragmentation of voice into many forms and markets is the heart of the Masterclass.) The market for voicemail is tied to that for telephony, which is in turn tied to the market for 'voice minutes' that is based on a limited number of spectrum licenses and copper networks. That whole stack is slowly falling apart, despite a corset of regulatory stays that holds the ungainly edifice in place.
There is no fundamental reason why the 'minutes' I buy have to be used for the telephony application supplied by my operator. Yes, there are many legacy technical issues, such as HLRs, numbering, etc. that stand in the way of me using my 'voice minutes' with any application, such as Skype. But those are not intrinsic. We can expect to see Facebook, Skype, Xbox and Facetime voice take equal stage with telephony.
An example of how stuck we are comes from my personal experience. I moved to an uber-value deal with Tesco Mobile -- £10/month for 500 minutes, unlimited texts and data. Of course, I missed the drawback - which was bad enough that I decided to amuse myself with a consumer complaint to the regulator, Ofcom:
Tesco Mobile does not support standard GSM features of call waiting and forwarding. This forces me to use Tesco's voicemail, and not any third party system such as Hullomail. This is not advertised, and effectively creates a monopoly for Tesco to supply voicemail during the contract period in a non-transparent and anti-competitive manner.
To which the response was:
There is no regulatory obligation on any provider to offer additional services such as call waiting and voicemail. Whether or not to allow access to such services is a commercial decision by each company. We are therefore unable to help with this matter.
(If anyone from Ofcom is reading, feel free to go look to inquiry ref 1-172103617.)
Now, from their framing of the world, their response makes sense. But in other markets, like automotive servicing, it has been decreed that tying the VAS to the core product is against the public interest and thus illegal when they can reasonably be expected to be separate markets.
Isn't it about time that people had a real choice of voicemail providers -- some of which might even take security seriously? That means at sign-up for a 'minutes' contract, you aren't simply defaulted to the access provider's service, but have a menu to choose from.
If you would like to explore these ideas further, do come to the Future of Voice Masterclass in London next Thursday. We still have some space available, and for Telepocalypse readers there is a 25% discount on the entry using code VIP25. Details and sign-up link at www.futureofcomms.com.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:24 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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