Business Week summarizes a variety of mobile VoIP services that allow you to make phone calls from your cellphone over Wi-Fi networks.
VoIP calling is already raising a ruckus in telecommunications, putting pressure on the price of land-line calling and luring subscribers toward upstarts like Vonage and Comcast away from incumbents such as AT&T, and Verizon. Now, the technology threatens to erode sales for mobile-phone service providers too.
These apps are popular amongst people who use iPhones, notes GigaOM, thanks to services such as Truphone, Gorilla Mobile and iCall.
ON World estimates that in 2011, mobile VoIP voice services may generate $33.7 billion, up from $516 million in 2006, the most recent year for which the figure is available. Jajah, for example, experienced a fivefold increase in just a year and now has more than 10 million users — and growing.
Carriers are not happy VoIP newcomers snapping up almost one-quarter of all wireless minutes now devoted to long-distance and international calls.
It’s not going to get any better. Skype, the eBay-owned service used by more than 338 million people to make free PC-to-PC calls, later this year plans to release a new product called “Skype for your mobile” that will let customers use local wireless minutes to make international calls. It works on almost 50 handsets, but uses cellular data services rather than Wi-Fi.
Wireless carriers are expected to generate $700 billion in sales of voice services this year, according to consulting firm Ovum. Together, international and long distance will make up 24% of the 1.2 billion wireless minutes used this year, estimates Insight Research.
In other news, text messaging in the United States continues to explode, according to new figures from VeriSign. The company said it delivered more than 52 billion messages during the second quarter of 2008, up more than 20% from the previous quarter and saw a daily average of 572 million messages, more than doubling the 230 million per day during the second quarter of 2007.
VeriSign offers Short Message Service delivery engines to more than 600 carriers, reaching more than 2.4 billion wireless subscribers across carrier, enterprise, and media/entertainment networks. SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, according to Wikipedia, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones.
Informa forecasts subscriptions to UMTS/HSPA will number nearly half a billion worldwide by the end of 2009, and will pass the one billion mark in 2012. Currently some 88% use GSM standards while 11% use CDMA.
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