Carriers may hate WhatsApp but wait till they see what's next!

The co-founder of WhatsApp, the popular messaging app that’s sucking billions in operator revenue, says he thinks his app is a benefit to wireless operators because it gets users to subscribe to data plans. He as well “intuits” that carriers are making enough money at this stage. Perhaps he doesn’t understand that on a per MB basis, texts net the operator 100 to 1,000 times more money than data does, or like as not he’s searching for a silver lining.

Interview yesterday

WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton told my colleague Ryan Kim in an interview yesterday, “The anecdotal stories we get from manufacturers is people are running into stores and demanding WhatsApp. The app is getting people to covert to smartphones from feature phones and getting them to set up data plans.”

So instead of putting the SMS horse back in the barn carriers need to focus not on WhatsApp nevertheless what’s straightway — the continued erosion of voice revenue as people talk less, message more and turn to IP services, even those within mobile apps. Thanks to services just as Twilio and Google Voice, it’s getting easier to bypass the carrier voice network altogether.

People usually call each other less, nevertheless even for calls they do make, just as checking that a business is open or perhaps making an appointment, they may in the near future switch over to VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) via a service like Twilio, which recently enabled iOS developers to add VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) features to their apps. For instance, a restaurant may include a click to call button in its app that uses VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) dialing, which means all you need is a data plan. So during voice right now is “worthless,” many people after all pay $35 to $70 a month for it should the contingency arise to their data plan. Yet smart carriers should keep an eye on in-app calling.

Some of them already are. A November survey from Telco 2.0 indicates that carriers in Europe, Africa and the Middle East thought voice revenue would decline by 21 percent on average over the straightway 3 years. About 44 percent of the delegates attending the Telco 2.0 session where the survey was conducted attributed the decline in voice to over-the-top alternatives.