Is telephony dead?

VoIP services continue to erode voice revenues for operators, hence the shift by many global CSPs to unlimited voice and text plans. Ovum predicts OTT and VoIP services will cost operators $479 billion by 2020, but don’t count voice out yet: the death of telephony is “exaggerated,” says Ovum. Service providers should work to create a richer voice service and find ways to further leverage customers’ unique identifier: their telephone number.

Jeremy Green, principal telecoms strategy analyst at Ovum, cautions that “taking such a pessimistic view obscures some important commercial realities and opportunities in the voice telephony market. The major threat posed by OTT VoIP is that it weakens customers’ attachment to their telephone number and transfers their attachment to a new address. This may turn out to be a more significant factor than the direct impact on telephony revenues,” he explains. “Operators should use telephone numbers as the identifier and address for cloud-based services, allow customers to choose numbers that are relevant to them and develop more application-to-person SMS applications.”

Moo-2-Moo communications

We’ve covered many wild and innovative uses for communications technology here at Pipeline, but this one takes the cake: Deutsche Telekom has partnered with MEDRIA Technologies to enable cows to text their owners. That’s right — cows. Using M2M connectivity and Deutsche Telekom SIM cards, cows can phone home when they need assistance.

According to the announcement, SIM cards are housed in M2M data-collection devices in the cow’s stable or field. Special sensors measure the cow’s vital data and relay it to the data-collection device. The device then notifies the farmer immediately by sending a text message. As a result, the farmer no longer needs to spend long nights in the stable. The M2M solution ensures that he can intervene promptly when a cow is about to calve and make optimal use of the short period of time when a cow is receptive to a mate.