Length of phone call drops and texting will decrease

The Register reports that call duration on Vodafone's network has dropped from over 3 minutes to 1 minute 40 seconds (see Mobile phone calls shorter).

Researching this issue further, fixed line voice minutes (not the same as duration obviously) have been cannbalised by the existance of mobile phones - no surprises there.

This interesting bar chart from the Economist from Hanging up - Reports of the death of the phone call are greatly exaggerated.


Notice that voice consumption - regardless of device - is dropping. The Economist's report notes that this decrease is matched by an explosion in texting. In the future, I anticipate that we shall look back and see that voice and texting have been in decline since 2010 as communication via data mushrooms.

See also this from Ofcom's The Communications Market Report from July 2012 from James Thickett, Ofcom's Director of Research:

'Our research reveals that in just a few short years, new technology has fundamentally changed the way that we communicate. Talking face to face or on the phone are no longer the most common ways for us to interact with each other.

'In their place, newer forms of communications are emerging which don't require us to talk to each other especially among younger age groups. This trend is set to continue as technology advances and we move further into the digital age.'In short, the arrival of each new generation of technology impacts incumbent technology and after a short period of innovation and experimentation, users work out the most efficient / optimal new mix of technologies at their disposal.'

The new kid on the block - 4G
I remain concerned about the potential success of 4G - there is the need for the quantity of data being transmitted, but I don't see the need for the speed. And Network operators do need to do a much better job of data pricing. As I have mentioned before (see Orange (at last) has a common sense data plan) unlimited policies provide no upper ceiling and are open to abuse. And abuse by 1% will account for a disproportionate cost of serving that content (ie video!).

Email is for old people

The NY Times published an article before Christmas about the drop in usage of email amongst teens.

The problem with e-mail, young people say, is that it involves a boringly long process of signing into an account, typing out a subject line and then sending a message that might not be received or answered for hours.

NYT quotes these stats:

The number of total unique visitors in the United States to major e-mail sites like Yahoo and Hotmail is now in steady decline, according to the research company comScore. Such visits peaked in November 2009 and have since slid 6 percent; visits among 12- to 17-year-olds fell around 18 percent.

One interviewee said:

E-mail has its place — namely work and other serious business, like online shopping. She and others say they still regularly check e-mail, in part because parents, teachers and bosses use it.

The substitution is text, IM and Facebook of course.

I pondered this over Christmas and did some further research. The argument is 5-8 years old: exactly the same stuff around the rise of instant messenger. See Interesting article: E-Mail is for Old People from 2006

I recall (with the horror, due to the trust / privacy violation) witnessing teens accepting a friend of a friend into their contact list, merely so that one person didn't have to have two chats going simultaneously. (With horror, because in instant messengers, the connection is ongoing and provides online presence too, whereas email is merely a single transaction.)

In a more recent article from February last year, Email is for Old People, the substitutes are text, twitter, or Facebook.

Here are the use cases:
"How do you communicate anything substantial, with only 160 characters?"

• "U only need 160 chars 2 say what U need 2 say. FYI."
• "Facebook is for bigger stuff - and pictures."
• "If you really need to write something big you just post it to your blog. I have an RSS feed of all my friends blogs."

Email has its place and won't be degraded to worthless. Teens lives are generally one dimensional: work, home, friends are all the same crowd, so one integrated tool will work for them. As they grow up, then the asynchronous advantages of email will be come useful to them.

SMS predictations are revised upwards

Portio Research takes an optimistic outlook for Mobile Messaging Futures 2007 - 2012. It upwardly revises previous predictions from 2005 - SMS growth has not flattened out in mature markets but continued to boom whilst the US market has grown much faster than expected. By 2012, global SMS revenue will reach $67b, driven by 3.7 trillion messages.

The report states that just in Asia 450 people every minute will get their first mobile phone - and the adoption will tick along at this rate for the next 6 years.

Portio reckons that Mobile IM will supplant SMS as the principle messaging service by 2011. I strongly disagree - because IM currently requires opt-in. Admittedly, interconnectivity between IM providers has occurred technically, but the mass market certainly hasn't appreciated this yet, nor is IM embedded at all with the weak exception of the US.

O2 allows users to store pictures, messages and contacts online

O2 (UK) intends to allow its mobile users to store photos from their camera phone and text messages online. (The initial service requires users to text content into a short code, but, in the future, reports 160 chars, these messages will cached automatically.

Additionally, users will be about to store all their contacts. ShoZu, a favorite application of mine, has been doing this for at least 18 months.

Yahoo's Mixd - group text messaging

Yahoo provides us with Mixd - a group text messaging service.

Looks very similar to 3Jam (although it allows you to share photos from the phone - nice). See my previous comments on 3Jam. Do you really think consumers are going to be able to master all the commands?

Etribes in the UK has a much simpler and slicker solution.