Nearly everyone use one type messaging app (WhatsApp, Facebook, Wechat, etc)
Whatsapp (or Telegram) is seen to be a disruptive technology to SMS and MMS combined. Worldwide trends have shown a drop in SMS revenues because of the increase in smartphones with data subscription. It’s true that there is still demand for SMS since there are still users that prefer or only can afford the non-smartphones (“old” phones).
How many of us have changed their habit in their daily communications. Some of the trends that you are seeing now such as below (and many are bad habits!):
- Messaging during meetings (especially during boring ones)
- Friends and family members can’t stop messaging at dinner table or in restaurants.
- Sending messages across the room or office cubicle or even across table!
- Chatting in more than 5 and sometimes 10 chat rooms.
- Can’t stop reading Whatsapp before going to sleep. And will be the first app to open after waking up from your sleep.
- Messaging in toilets
- Instantly forwarding any interesting news or photos to groups of friends
- ….and many more!
Other than the normal Telegram chat, there are some group of people who have been developing Telegram gateways that will send alerts or notifications to the users instead of SMS (either for targeted mobile advertising or replacing the SMS alert when IT system down etc). This will be disruptive because it will not only send simple text but can include image or video.
Thus, in the Internet of Things (IoT) world ,OTT will be a very big help in reducing the costs of sending data to the end users (instead of using SMS). End users will be able to receive notifications from their connected “Things” directly to their smartphones via Twitter or Telegram or Whatsapp. Some people also considered Twitter as OTT too.
A colleague of mine said – History repeat itself. Email replaces traditional letter. VoiP replaces fixed line. WhatsApp replaces SMS,MMS. Skype (other apps) will replace Mobile voice.
It’s not only SMS and MMS will suffer, users have turned to Whatsapp as the primary main of communications compared to voice. Personally, I have been more Whatsapp messages in a day than the normal voice calls.
When every device turns IP-based, all telco services will be replace with only “app-based”. Thus, how will telcos keep up with this trend? Don’t you think this is disruptive?
The article (courtesy of Azuan Muda) quoted what is said in the above article.
About the Author
Dr. Mazlan Abbas is an IOT Evangelist, Thought Leader and CEO of REDtone IOT. You can reach him on LinkedIn at https://my.linkedin.com/in/mazlan/ or Twitter at http://twitter.com/mazlan_abbas . For further details, check out http://about.me/mazlan.abbas
