Mobile VoIP in Europe unlikely to achieve mass market soon

Fitch Ratings says today that mobile VoIP in the European telecoms industry is unlikely to achieve mass market take up for some time. However, as network quality improves, selective usage of mobile VoIP could start to impact operators' revenue from higher tariff services like international calls and voice roaming.

In similarity to fixed telephony, mobile VoIP creates a technology arbitrage opportunity between voice and data. Given the current pricing of mobile data packages, Fitch estimates the cost per minute of a mobile VoIP call using a 3G network is around 10-20 times cheaper than the cost of a normal mobile phone call. (Fitch compared the cost of a normal mobile call, based on the average price of minutes in a standard large minutes-inclusive bundle, with the estimated cost of a mobile VoIP call based on the average per unit price of a typical mobile data tariff.) Article