Spectranet boss tasks telcos operators on business model
Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Spectranet Limited, Mr. David Venn, has called on telecommunication operators in the country to embrace new technology in the deployment of their services to allow for healthy competition in the sector.
Venn’s call is coming on the heels of broadband internet services’ entry into voice calls which is the exclusive domain of the mobile telecommunication operators who had protested that were losing huge revenue because of the encroachment.
However, Venn said that it had been the practice all over the world for big telecommunication firms to lobby their regulatory agencies, but that he believed that in this age such lobbies were no longer necessary, and all such firms needed to do was to improve on their technology.
Many multinationals in the country are worried that they are losing billions of naira of their voice revenue to Over The Top Services (OTTS) through the likes of WhatsApp, Neflis, Skype which customers use to make free calls.
Normally, the big mobile telecommunications companies often provide their customers with the 3G data bundle which consist of both voice and data, while most broadband internet providers goes for 4G data bundle which is strictly for data.
Venn pointed out that the argument that the mobile telecommunication companies were losing their voice revenue was not true, adding that the customers were actually paying for the calls through their data bundle, whether through Spectranet or any other broadband internet provider like Smile and others.
“Let me say this, around the world, telecom operators are lobbying regulators to somehow regulate Over The Top Services, the only reason that are doing it is that they are losing revenue, when WhatsApp launched about three years ago, SMS revenue disappeared and operators were making a lot of money from SMS which didn’t cost them anything to carry SMS, they were making a lot of money, they lost it to WhatsApp,” he said.
According to the Spectranet boss, mobile telecommunications companies should up their game and change their business model affirming, that the reason why they were complaining was because they were using an old technology which has been in existence in the past 15 to 30 years ago.
Venn added that the 3G data bundle was failing the big mobile companies envisaging that in few years from now, most of the calls will be made on Apps would be totally free.
He said” At the moment and in a very short time, all that calling is going to be on Apps, it is going be WhatsApp, Skype, or all sort of Over The Top services, you are not going to make a phone call, I mean the old kind of phone calls that we make today”
“If for example, you MTN are losing revenue for voice, change your business model, this is what you have to do, you can’t try and clinch on to an old technology and think that you are going to be earning the revenue from the calls, you are not paying for them, the customers are paying for it, and that is why we don’t do voice at all, we only do data and you can use it for whatever you want. We don’t care whether it is WhatsApp. Apple, Facebook, Skype and so on. You talked about Apple and using the product to do a lot of things”
“Customers can use Spectranet data service for various things whether it is streaming movies, Skype, or WhatsApp, it didn’t matter whatever platforms since they got data service on it, they get access to anything they want, normally, people that thought they are stealing revenues like voice calls and they want to try to protect it and stop it, they are not going to win, no they can’t win,” Venn added.
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