Etisalat Group’s chief digital services officer, Khalifa Al Shamsi, believes the era of mobile network operators blocking the services of over the top (OTT) players is a bygone era, even in the Middle East.
Speaking at the Middle East Telco Summit in Dubai this morning, Al Shamsi said: “Network operators cannot block application providers as a sustainable strategy. Network operators themselves need to innovate and partner with OTT players and other innovators.”
His comments came on the back of estimates that application providers such as WhatsApp are eating into network operators’ service revenues at an increasing rate, having invested in none of the network infrastructure required to deliver their applications.
“At Etisalat, we are looking to work with partners in areas such as IP voice as we realise much of the innovation in our industry is coming from outside the industry,” Al Shamsi said.
Earlier this week it was reported that Facebook is in talks to acquire the mobile messaging platform WhatsApp.
The report did not reveal its sources, nor the potential size or nature of the takeover discussions, yet such a deal is seen as credible as Facebook seeks to bolster its mobile credentials.
WhatsApp is available as a smartphone app in over a hundred countries and according to reports has 100 million daily active users globally. At the end of October 2011, the last time the company released any usage numbers; it said it was serving 1 billion messages per day.
WhatsApp is currently the number-two paid app in the US version of Apple’s App Store, where it sells for US$0.99. On Google Play, the app is free for the first year, and then US$0.99 per year thereafter. Data from Google Play suggests that the app has been downloaded between 100 million and 500 million times to date.
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A step forward and good for customers.
As Mr. Al Shamsi said, to partner with OTT players, but differentiate in quality of service is a must and is much desired by users. Operators, networks have to be made ready by deploying service performance required using PCRF and Carrier Ethernet.
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