According to a recent survey of industry executives, telecom service providers fear declining revenues in the messaging segment of their business. To be specific, the fear is that losses of 20 percent to 35 percent in voice and messaging revenues within three years is the nature of the threat.
It is important to point out that changes in consumer demand or technology adoption typically proceed quite slowly at first, but tend to reach a tipping point where the movement is much more dramatic. It is not news that voice revenues are declining. That slow “drip, drip, drip” process has been underway for several decades.
Only recently have executives started to worry about something similar happening to messaging revenue, text messaging in particular. The non-scientific sample of opinion might not wind up being “right,” at least in terms of magnitude over a three-year period.
But it might also be wise to consider that once an inflection point is hit, change can occur quite abruptly. The real issue is how close some service providers, in some markets, might be to such an infection point.
One suspects the shift in messaging is much earlier in its evolution, so the big danger remains voice revenues.
