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VOIP iPhone App Viber will kill telcos sooner rather than later

I talk about this issue about investing in telcos in past article that in terms of usage, there will be a shift from voice to data.

The upside of Pingchat, WhatsApp and Skype

Web Services such as Skype, Whatsapp and Pingchat have slowly changed the way we communicate. It is so much easier to instant message your friends rather than SMS or call.

On PingChat, I group chat with 2 other friends and do not have to care whether they are there or not. Messages gets pushed to them. My 2 friends have iphone at work so they communicate on and off during office hours while I checked their messages at home on my ipod touch and respond accordingly.

The greatest part of this form of communication that Whatsapp and Pingchat promotes over MSN Messenger and the like is that, there is no AWAY or not available, as your friends are deemed always available since they have their smartphones with them most of the time.

Viber the free VOIP App

Viber right now is abit of a game changer. Its like Whatsapp only its to call between users.

According to Daring Fireball, here are its good features:

• Initial setup is very easy. Your phone number is your Viber identifier. You launch the app, tell it your phone number, and a moment or two later they send an SMS to that same number with a code to confirm it. Enter the code in Viber and you’re done.
• It works over 3G (and Wi-Fi, of course).
• It’s designed as a replacement for, or at least an alternative to, the built-in Phone app. Call another Viber user and the call goes through Viber over IP; call a non-Viber user from Viber and it switches you to the iPhone’s built-in Phone app and initiates a regular voice call. The idea is you can always go to the Viber app when you want to make a call, regardless if the recipient is on Viber or not.
• Incoming Viber calls work even when the app isn’t running, thanks to push notifications.
• Call quality, even over AT&T 3G, is pretty good — far superior to actual phone calls. The poor audio quality of iPhone voice calls in the U.S. is shameful. A call to a friend in the Netherlands sounded great too — a few very brief glitches, but good sound overall and very low latency.

And whats bad:

• Poor matching of existing phone numbers. The Viber app detects when your friends sign up for Viber by matching their numbers in your address book. But I had a friend (who signed up for Viber) whose contact entry in my address book was in the form “1 (###) ###-####”. The Viber app couldn’t identify him until I edited his phone number to the form “(###) ###-####”.
• No custom ringtones — you’re stuck with the single default one Viber provides.
• When you sign up for Viber, they send a push notification to everyone in your address book who has already signed up for Viber. I’m not sure it’s right to call this a privacy issue, per se, because it’s only sending notifications to people whose phone number you have and who have your phone number, but I’m opposed to any service that sends notifications to others on my behalf without my consent. And there is no way to turn this feature off.
• As stated above, the Viber app attempts to serve as a replacement for the built-in Phone app — acting as a front-end for both Viber VOIP calls and regular cellular voice calls. But it’s not really a replacement for the Phone app — it can’t access your voicemail or your recent (voice) calls list. So you still need the Phone app.
• You don’t pay Viber a cent for using it, but when you’re on 3G, calls using Viber count against your data plan limit. And, given that Viber is iPhone-only and AT&T offers free calling between AT&T users, it raises a question as to why you’d use it. (One answer: the audio quality really is far superior.)

What it means to telecom stocks like Singtel, Starhub, M1, China Mobile and Telefonica

Here is what I think:

1. It will make data plans more popular. It makes it easier for telcos to sell such plans. Make no mistake, data plans will be more prevalent
2. This cannibalizes existing voice plans. Think about it: out of a 40 buck plan you are paying 5 dollar for caller id, 15 dollar for additional data and 20 dollar for voice and sms. Essentially why would you need to pay for voice and sms in the future? look for telcos ARPU to fall.
3. Although voip on data is only 60% of the data bandwidth compare to voice, if voip gets popular and everyone use smartphones, data transmission between cell tower and your phone will be pretty congested especially in areas like Raffles City and Orchard. This requires more capital expenditure. Cost for telcos up.

The end state is that probably more opportunities but telcos becomes worse off. What do you guys think?

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