In March, Chetan Sharma released a 2015 US Mobile Market update report.  There are many interesting points in this report, but one thing I want to talk about today is that voice revenues declined by 24% and messaging revenues declined by 18%.  Wow, that’s a lot.  And since the overall mobile market increased in the US, that means data service revenue is increasing quite a bit.  Is that a concern or not?

Years ago, clearly this was a concern.  No one wanted to just be a bit pipe. It’s pretty well understood and accepted now that in order for that not to be the case, then value added services on top of the data pipe will need to be utilized.  So the concept of the connected car, smart city, smart home, etc. is where the future growth is. All of these concepts require data and are value added services on top of it, but do not utilize messaging or voice.   

But there are huge opportunities for messaging or voice innovation here on top of these new services.  The application or service doesn’t have to revolve around voice or text as in the past, but voice, video or text can be an integral / optional part of one of the new IoT type of services.  That means WebRTC and media servers can play a huge role in some of these new innovative services going forward. 

Next week I’ll start a 3 part blog series about IoT and real-time communications to explore this concept a bit more.