Mobile portal voice and video over Internet protocol (VoIP) offered by third-party application-based providers pose a huge and direct challenge to the $700 billion global mobile voice market Mobile
carriers face the real prospect of losing a major slice of their voice traffic and revenue to new non- infrastructure players that use VoIP

“Ten years from now, more than half of mobile voice traffic will be carried end-to-end using VoIP”
(Gartner Research)

In the full report Gartner advises carriers to start thinking now about how the transition will occur and how they might cooperate and partner with other types of service providers. This may appear to be a long term threat but it provides an early opportunity to create micro-marketing channels to target consumer groups within a mobile operators registered user base to reduce churn and attract new users.

A client company of ours taking the opportunity serious is Eplixo who have evolved their web based VoIP multi user video conferencing service to mobile phones and have recently launched their international SMS service which aims to reduce the cost of business and consumer travelers while abroad. Their fully integrated application runs in the background of all Windows Mobile phones and pops up in place of the users SMS system. Video invitations are also sent via SMS and calls are carried over VoIP thus reducing roaming charges completely using Wi-Fi.

Of course Eplixo are not the only ones competing for the lucrative access to the communications space as Skype have more than 500 million users and NimBuzz with 150 million but the size of the market is so big that the land grab for niche market sectors is in the order of millions and is very much a global opportunity rather than just a local one.