Say you need to talk to your friend, who’s either somewhere else in Waterloo or somewhere around the world. You’ll usually either send them a Facebook message, an email, a BBM/iMessage or (if they’re in the country) a text. If you want to talk to them you have the option of calling them, but increasingly more of us prefer using Internet services such as Skype or, to a lesser extent, FaceTime or Google Voice. For wireless providers, the end result is that your social interactions are less under their control, which means they have less ways to offer you add-ons and extra services.
Rogers has announced a Rogers One Number service as a way of competing with the growing threat of independent Internet video and chat services. While AT&T apparently has had a similar system to this for a few months, this is both something I hadn’t heard a network operator trying before and the first time I’ve heard of such a service in Canada. The service, in addition to attaching texts and calls to your phone number as it does currently, allows you operate these from your computer and mobile devices. You have the option to connect your Gmail or Yahoo! Mail accounts to the service so you can read them next to your texts. Phone calls can be made from the web interface for free to any Canadian number, and video calls can be made to other Rogers One Number users. In addition, you can convert calls from mobile calls to web calls to video calls. The service is free for all Rogers Wireless subscribers.
However, as is typical for Canadian wireless providers, it’s not entirely clear how much of this is truly free, and what the hidden costs might be. It was hard for me to tell from their website when a call uses up your minutes or when it’s free. I don’t have a Rogers phone, so I wasn’t able to try it out, but I’m curious as to how many people would actually use this. People already seem to avoid attaching too much to providers. How many people you know today actually have a Rogers or Sympatico email that they use? There has been a wide shift to provider-independent services like Gmail where you can still use the service even if you get a new Internet service provider. Even BBM and iMessage, for those who can use them, are favoured over texts because of the extra features they have and because they don’t count against any limit. If anything, it comes across like more of a novelty for between Rogers’ customers.
Another company making a move to compete with Skype is Vonage, that landline VoIP calling service that I only ever heard of from American TV commercials on TBS. Apparently, they’re still around, and they’ve launched Vonage Mobile, an app for iOS and Android that lets users make free high-def calls and texts to other Vonage Mobile users and cheap pay-per-minute calls to users who don’t use Vonage.
The service is a lot like Skype, but claims to make international calls at a rate that’s 70% cheaper than big mobile carriers and 30% cheaper than Skype. They also claim to have a much better call quality than you can get on Skype with only a 64kbps connection. Viber is visually similar to Vonage Mobile, but that service only works between Viber users. The main drawback, which goes for Skype and other Internet-based services, is that they can feed off your data plan when you’re not on a Wi-Fi network. The ability to use the services over Wi-Fi arguably negates this issue since most of the time people are on Wi-Fi anyway.
Neither of these services will likely replace Skype for most people, but they do offer a more competitive offering than most services that are out so far. More importantly, they offer an improvement over the current carrier-based methods we use today. It’s not hard to believe that in 10 or 15 years, voice plans will be an increasingly rare, if not obsolete, part of the wireless package. Without getting too much into specifics, some carriers are working to bring IP-based voice to their networks, which would mean you may not necessarily need to use a voice plan anymore, depending on how it’s implemented. The increase in services that compete with traditional voice plans is good for everyone, as it will force traditional carriers to rethink their plans (as evinced by Rogers’ aforementioned attempts) and in the end, find you a better way to talk to your friends and family.
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