LATAM Telecom

A recent article published by the New York Times (Jill Colvin, "You’ve Got Voice Mail, but Do You Care?" , April 1st, 2009) announced the demise of Voice Mail and the rise of new technology and services such as Google Voice's Voice to Text and the iPhone's Visual Voice Mail. According to the article, most people don't bother to listen to their voice mail messages and that the technology is obsolete. Interesting article but Colvin's article misses the point: most of the new services she presents as examples of technology that is replacing voice mail are actually an evolution of voice mail technology. Voice to Text, for example, which is included in Google Voice, is a voice mail message delivery mechanism that allows text transcription of voice mail messages. This means that you have to have a voice mail message to begin with. It is new technology that provides a better user interface to recover voice mail messages, precisely what Colvin points out is missing fr...

"This is the exact time to invest - if you can - because not only is there opportunity, but there are lots of resources out there." - Mike Lazaridis Picture: Research In Motion co-CEOs Jim Balsillie (left) and Mike Lazaridis THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nathan We are one quarter into 2009, a year that is turning out to be one of the most challenging to navigate in recent history. As this first quarter comes to an end I want to share my thoughts on what to expect for the rest of the year. Like other sectors of the economy, the Telecom industry faces huge economic challenges as the United States and other nations slip into a global recession: The Telecom Industry will face a slowdown in 2009; IDATE reports that the telecom equipment market will suffer a downturn with an expected growth rate of 1% compared to the year before. This will affect infrastructure and mobile phones; IDC predicts worldwide mobile phone shipments to fall 8.3% in 2009 . Companies will face the downturn by limitin...

Pinky: Gee, Brain, what are we going to do tonight? Brain: The same thing we do every night, Pinky - try to take over the world! Last week Google announced that GrandCentral, acquired by Google in 2007, is now Google Voice, with new features including voicemail to text and archive and search of SMS text messages. Analysts and bloggers are divided on how this will impact voice revenues from local and international calls, but the ability to offer free Internet calls will surely be seen as a threat. When Nokia announced last month that Skype came preloaded on the N97, it incurred the displeasure of mobile operators. According to Mobiletoday.co.uk , UK operators Orange and O2 may end up refusing to stock the N97 unless Nokia eliminated the application. The incursion of Skype and Google into telecommunications adds to the mounting pressure mobile operators are facing from new players. Last year, when Apple announced it was opening up its platform to developers, they redefined the power bal...

Subscriber usage behavior clearly shows that the Latin American market is ready for a solution such as GSMA Personal IM, also known as SMS 2.0 (Telefonica Spain, Acision) or Instant SMS (Comverse). The chart above measures three elements: Data ARPU (x), mobile penetration (y) and average number of SMS messages per user per month for several Latin American countries (1) . The countries with SMS usage in the region are Venezuela, Argentina and Ecuador; with Colombia having the lowest SMS usage. These countries also have a higher data ARPU; this is not surprising as in Latin America 70% to 90% of data revenue comes from SMS. What's relevant here is subscriber SMS usage, surpassing 100 messages per user per month as in the case of Venezuela and more recently Argentina; this tells us that heavy users are actually having live conversations using SMS; in other words, a segment of subscribers uses SMS as Instant Messaging, with a higher number of messages going back and forth per conversa...

The time has come for SMS 2.0? In the last three years, we have seen vendors introduce new messaging solutions, all claiming to be the next step in SMS evolution. Presence enabled services have received a lot of attention but have limited traction in the mobile market. IM, by no means a new service, has been one of the most successful services but still far behind the penetration SMS has. SMS reached a mature stage years ago, its growth rate has flattened and it has kept the same form and functionality since it was first introduced. However, it remains one the top revenue generator for mobile operators. So what do you do for an encore? Cellular News published an interesting note on February 2nd: "­Acision has announced that Russian mobile operator, MTS is using its Instant Messaging solution to offer an enhanced messaging experience to its subscribers. Combining the Acision Person to Person Gateway with core elements from Colibria's product portfolio - including the Instant M...

With mobile penetration around the world reaching saturation, and the growth rate for traditional services flattening, operators are looking for new options to increase revenue. However, traditional services (voice, SMS) continue to be the main revenue generators for operators and there are still many interesting options to continue milking the cash cow. Services such as Ring Back Tones, MMS and Push e mail, when they were first introduced, created huge expectations that have not been delivered. In addition, operators get distracted by these new services and tend to overlook the basics. Voice mail, for example, is still the main call completion service and SMS continues to be the main messaging service worldwide; it is expected this trend will continue for the next few years. Operators can benefit from looking at options that sit on top of both services, to revitalize them and target missed opportunities. One of the key advantages to leveraging voice and SMS is that they can be used to...

Voice Mail and SMS have been in a mature stage for several years now; growth in most markets has slowed down and until recently, they kept the same form and functionality they had since they were first introduced years ago. Both services, however, remain the bread and butter of VAS services. In most markets (the USA being a notable exception) Voice Mail is the largest VAS contributor to revenue for mobile operators; SMS in some cases accounts for up to 90% of data revenue. This alone justifies paying attention to recent developments that are breathing new life into these two services by dramatically improving the user experience with visual interfaces. The best example of this is the iPhone, which introduced to the market visual applications for both services. Visual Voice Mail had been around for several years, but it was not until the iPhone was introduced that it got the attention of mobile operators. While it can be argued that the iPhone reflects a shift in users’ expectations as ...

We have discussed previously (see here and here ) the huge potential and appeal Voice to Text has and the fast penetration it has seen worldwide, including the recent launch in Latin America by Movistar Chile (see Spinvox press release here ). Ther key element that seems to be missing, however, is the lack of enthusiasm Voice Mail vendors have shown for this service. Voice to text delivers voice mail messages via SMS in text format, so integration to the Voice Mail platform is a key component. We have seen strong marketing efforts by Spinvox and Nuance, and operators worldwide are responding. Voice mail vendors, on the other hand, seem to be in a responsive mode, collaborating with integration efforts but not really pushing the service. Perhaps the single notable exception to this might be the agreement Nuance signed with Comverse, who is the leading Voice Mail vendor wolrdwide with >50% market share, but even that was an initiative led by Nuance, not Comverse. Given the fact that v...

Comverse at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was selected as a finalist for the 2008 GSMA Global Mobile Award in the Best Mobile Messaging Service category. They showed us not only their iPhone Visual VoiceMail but also other demos for different types of handsets for non iPhone operators and segments. This is probably the single most important breaktrhough innovation in VoiceMail since it was launched. Interestingly, the breakthrough came form an outsider, breaking all the rules to which both operators and handset vendors had played for years. As we have reported here before, there are strong rumors that Telcel Mexico and Claro Brazil are next in line to launch the iPhone. Given the size of the market and the dominance of both operators, it's a non brainer Apple might want to partner with them. The question is, will Venezuela and Argentina also be considered, given the size and importance of both markets. Venezuela, for example, is expected to be similar in size as Brazil for mes...

From one of my favorite techie blogs at Salon.com , Farhad Manjoo today posted about Google working together with the city of San Francisco to provide free voice mail to to the city's homeless: "Bless Google for doing something amazing: The company is handing out phone numbers and voice-mail boxes to every homeless person in San Francisco. Folks can sign up for the numbers at shelters across the city. The numbers will be local and personal -- i.e., each person will get a unique 415-area code number that will never expire. The number will ring a voice-mail box that will play a personalized greeting; homeless people can check their messages by dialing in from any phone." Great initiative by Google and SF mayor Gavin Newsom, that others can and should emulate! This idea should be adopted by other cities, surely Verizon and others will be happy to participate in similar initiatives. In Latin America, this reminds me of an initiative by Carlos Slim's TELMEX, the fixed line...

John Delaney and Vincent Poulbere from Ovum bring to our attention how mobile advertising can help operators face their two biggest challenges: declining ARPUs and expanding their reach into media. An interesting initiative by GSMA announced at Barcelona was the creation of a Working Group to define common metrics and measurement processes for mobile advertising. Vodafone, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Orange and 3 are the five members of this group. Ovum mentions other activities at Barcelona that clearly show enthusiasm for bringing advertising into the mobile world such as round table discussions and initiatives by different vendors including Comverse Mobile Advertising Solution, Nokia's Media Network, Openwave's Contextual Advertising and Amdocs' mobile advertising solution. While we applaud their efforts, we should note that operators have still a lot of work ahead to catch up and bring the web to the mobile world. Internet advertising has come a long way but it remains unchar...

The initiative by Brazilian Operators together with GSMA is groundbreaking in Latin America, not only because of the imminent launch of Personal Instant Messaging in the region with all six operators offering interconnection but also for the fact that these operators are sitting together in a work group to define a product, evaluate vendors and complete a through study before launch. We expect that this will delay even more the launch of the service, which has been evaluated by operators like TIM, VIVO and Claro for at least two years now. However, the approach of this work group, led by Ms Paloma Vivanco of GSMA, will increase the likelihood of a succesful launch and service penetration. The work group met recently in Rio to discuss with different vendors their solutions. Among the vendors presenting were market leaders Acision, Colibira and Comverse, as well as an up and coming Uruguayan company, INI. The only other big IM vendor that always seems to be absent from Latin America init...

Voicemail has been a common service for both wireless and fixed network operators in Latin America for more than 10 years but it has remained essentially unchanged since its introduction. Calls on busy/unavailable/unreachable are transferred to Voicemail , where callers can leave a message. The called party receives a notification, usually by SMS and then dials in, enters a password and listens to recorded messages. Even though vendors like Comverse and Glenayre have had multimedia voicemail solutions for a while now, it was not until AT&T launched the iPhone that services like Visual Voicemail started gaining traction in the end user's perception. This is prompting operators to look into bringing their Voicemail into the 21st century. Even though it is a service that in many countries in Latin America has almost 100% penetration, operators have been slow in updating their Voicemail application. The iPhone's Visual Voicemail interface, however, is changing subscribers...