Innovating Basic Call And Text Services: Targeting A Market Of A Billion Plus Users

In the early 2000s, we saw a revolution in the way people used mobile phones. First, Nokia, Microsoft and Research-In-Motion popularized the use of smartphone among business users. Then, Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android led to an explosion of smartphone usage among consumers, extending the rise of smartphones beyond the business setting. The boom in smartphone usage also came with an attendant rise in data usage, which has far outpaced the growth of voice and SMS usage globally. Data is Fast Overtaking Voice According to the Ericsson Mobility Report published in June 2015, data usage on mobile networks has taken a sharp uptick since 2010. Between the first quarters of 2014 and 2015 alone, the amount of data traffic from mobile phones rose by a whopping 55%. Voice, on the other hand, has remained relatively the same, with no significant increases in usage. By the end of the year 2020, 80% of mobile traffic will be data from smartphones. The traditional cellular voice call is beginning to lose relevance as more calls are being made through data networks originally intended for browsing the Internet. Mobile operators have begun a process of slowly co-opting Wi-Fi networks to supplement their bandwidth capacity. Examples of this include T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi Calling application and Google’s Project Fi. The addition of Wi-Fi allows for mobile networks to hand off bandwidth usage to higher-capacity hubs.