TORONTO – Providing voice over Internet is only the beginning.
A richer, fuller feature set (video, videoconferencing, seamless wireless and wireline integration and other niche services) will be what truly leads that market into profits and potential, said a panel discussion at the Canadian Telecom Summit, which began this morning at the Toronto Congress Centre.
With companies like AOL and Yahoo! and MSN and Google turning voice into some sort of free throw-away to attract more eyeballs to its clients’ ads, the traditional voice providers – as well as the newcomers such as VOIPsters Vonage and the cable companies – will have to come up with more and more and more to hang onto their customers.
"Google currently has 25 different voice initiatives ongoing, said Mike Couture, vice-president of marketing at Amdocs. "(Google, Yahoo!, et al. are playing a different game where voice is just an add-on to attract more viewers to their advertising."
Bell Canada’s VP consumer services development, Brad Fisher said his team now no longer things of just VOIP and now considers MOIP (multimedia over IP) in everything they do. He then outlined a number of Bell products and services that those in the industry are familiar with.
However, doing multimedia over IP is not easy. Handing voice calls from carrier to carrier is done well, is entrenched and is standards-based. Not so for MOIP. How to handle a conference call when sending it from a corporate IP network to the PSTN and to another VOIP carrier? Can’t be done here right now. "There are no multimedia handoffs to other carriers at this time," said Fisher.
Videotron has a number of new services in the planning stages now to add to its voice and multimedia offerings, said VP marketing and new product development Manon Brouillette. The company had 227,000 customers at the end of March as customers are – at least initially – attracted to its low voice price ($15.99 a month to start) and all-in-one cable, telecom and Internet bill.
"Soon, Videotron Internet customers will be able to pull in content from their PVR (to their PCs)," she said. Another product Brouillette said was coming soon is the ability for customers to program their PVRs with their wireless phone, something TiVo and Verizon have agreed to do Stateside. Taking a live TV show from your TV screen with you to your wireless phone is another service Brouillette mentioned.
Now, these aren’t inherently VOIP services, but they are additional niche products that will reduce churn thanks to the bundle of services and are delivered via IP.
Vonage Canada’s VP marketing and business development, Joe Parent, however, insisted that single-service companies like his can thrive despite all the MOIP talk and dismissed what he called "the bundling myth."
Single service companies offer the best of breed when it comes to technology and since they have just the one thing to do, customer service is better, said Parent.
And with all that cable companies and telcos offer on their plants, companies like Vonage and Primus and others like it are worried about so-called net neutrality – making sure that data from the ISP isn’t preferred over data from the third-party voice provider. "We believe the consumer should be able to use their broadband connection any way they wish," he said and that they should decide what gets preference.
With all the products and services that are bundled together, Parent says he worries that cablecos or telcos will make sure their data takes precedence in the network.
Bundles, he added "were created by marketers for marketers" that encourage laziness in companies and don’t save the consumer any money anyway. "Bundles encourage customers to pay for things they don’t need to get moderate discounts on things they do need," he added. The long term contracts required when customers sign on for bundles mean there’s less choice and flexibility and since consumers are locked in for, say three years, "it encourages complacency. (The companies) are less motivated."
Finally, customers don’t save at all, added Parent. "I’ll let you do the math, but bundles provide a lesser discount than if customers were buying ‘best of breed’," he said.
Surf back to cartt.ca throughout the week for more from the Canadian Telecom Summit.
