Will MNOs Lose Their Voice Customers?

In the fixed line era, a phone number has been tied to a line. In the mobile voice era it has been tied to a handset (or a SIM card). In the coming mobile data era, the phone number will be fully virtualized. Tied to a profile of a user that logs on to a mobile terminal.

Trying to look at the potential landscape of mobile network operators in 2020, one thing seems to be clear. There will be no voice calls, at least not on a network level. All parts of a network will be packet data. Packet data with many classes of service, of course. There will be customers paying premium for priority and may be even CIRs (although the idea of CIR in a mobile network with shared resources may be stretched a little...). Voice will be data too. Simply VoIP.

Mobile VoIP, when finally supported by MNOs and handset vendors, will free us from tying our numbers to the mobile operators we sign connectivity contracts with. Phone numbers will become fully virtualized. Depending on a profile we sign on with when, booting the handset, and not tied to the signal provider.

Of course the incumbent MNOs will be providing voice number service too. But we will not have to get it from them. And most of us will not. Some because they will prefer to stay less tied to a single company. And others because there will be may voice number service providers, offering us much more flexibility and more features.

Think Facebook. Or Google Voice. They are the companies you may want to have your voice number registered with. Offering you many more features to handle a voice call, offering seamless addressbook integration, synchronization and backup. Services and features we have been begging our present MNOs to no avail. Not to mention integration of availability statuses, multimodal (text / voice / video) calls, wideband quality and so on... Worry not. There are other providers happy to give us what we want. And let the incumbents become dumb pipes, albeit mobile ones.