Orange took its Life Is Better On (Libon) app out of Beta and launched a fully-fledged service on Apple’s AppStore.
Up until now, Orange has had about 1,000 Beta testers of the product, trialling the ability to call over IP, do instant messaging, set personalised greetings and convert messages from voice to text. The launch attracted a fair amount of attention from tech blogs waking up to the fact that carriers are starting to innovate with products that look competitive to their own core services.
This reminded me of a story I never got the chance to tell. About two years ago I did a joint briefing with an Orange product manager and the marketing department of an OTT VoIP provider. Orange was white-labelling the SIP client of the VoIP provider to provide an enterprise-focussed VoIP service over WLAN to business users. The idea was that when employees of businesses who had signed up to the service were abroad, they would be able to call and message over WiFi, for free, instead of incurring Orange’s voice and SMS roaming fees.
There was a slight potential downside to Orange of losing that revenue, but there was also the upside of customer loyalty and goodwill.
In time, it was clearly intimated, the VoIP capability would be moved to the consumer market, and also to enable “in-country” VoIP — ie to be able to call for free when not roaming.
And then… nothing. I was asked to delay publishing as the announcement had been postponed. This was after I’d done my briefing under embargo, so I held onto the story because there wasn’t much point writing about something that wasn’t going to happen. A postponement became a delay, became a withdrawal, and nothing was published. (Of course, the counter story was “Orange kills internal VoIP project”, but I was under embargo. I don’t think embargos are a great thing, but I do know that if you’ve signed up to one you should respect it.)
So what happened? The suspicion, from someone close to the deal, is that at the same time as the progress on this particular flavour of VoIP, Orange was set to be part of group of operators who were heading to Mobile World Congress to announced a commitment to launch RCS-e. What was RCS-e? It was a slimmed-down version of the the RCS specs that was going to enable VoIP, IP messaging, and other good things, over mobile data networks. The launch of a “competitive” VoIP offering was perhaps deemed too politically and commercially sensitive, and too confusing.
Fast forward nearly two years, and we see Orange launching a full consumer VoIP proposition, with Libon. Of course, there’s not only Orange, but Telefonica with TuMe and T-Mobile with Bobsled. Orange is also partnering with Facebook for an onsite click to call service called Party Call.
So what has changed in that time? WhatsApp has changed. Skype going to Microsoft has changed. Facetime and iMessage have changed. Viber has changed. Operators have been forced into confronting the erosion of “core service” (read voice and SMS) revenues.
And yet, there is still RCS, which still remains one for the future in nearly all markets (excepting Spain, and MetroPCS in the USA). At the same time as launching Party Call and Libon, Orange said it was still committed to RCS, would be launching RCS as native to devices in 2013, and would make its other IP commas services RCS-compatibile.
So the existence of RCS doesn’t necessarily mean an operator can’t launch other propositions, as we are now seeing.
People talk about lack of operator innovation. Here, two years ago, was an operator on the cusp of launching what we would now term a “telco OTT” service. If it had done so, who knows the reaction? Probably not much, given it was over WiFi only, and only when roaming, and only for enterprise.
But that’s two years of Orange VoIP or whatever it would have been called that the operator has missed out on. So was it lack of innovation that killed the project? You could argue it was too much innovation – RCS and IMS and SIP and VoIP swilling around – allied to the fear of failure plus an ingrained political cautiousness.
Cautiousness was not something in evidence this week at the launch of The People’s Operator. The people operating The People’s Operator think they have hit on a new way of encouraging charitable donations, by taking a slice of people’s regular outgoing monthly phone spend, and giving it to a charity of the subscriber’s choice. As a marketing USP for an MVNO, you can see the attraction. One tariff is much like another, these days, but if you think that you will be doing good for a cause of your choice, you may well sign up for that operator as opposed to another.
Meanwhile, some people being very cautious were Silent Circle, a slightly strange amalgamation of ex special ops snipers and the like, and world-renowned cryptographers. Essentially, the SEAL/SAS guys are the marketing and sales end, whilst the technology is taken care of by the crypto experts. The key pitch is that calls and texts are inherently insecure and can be plucked out of the air by people with a little know how and not much more money. The problem is, there’s understandable caution in explaining how that happens. “We just know it does happen.” When I asked how easy it was, the response I got was ironic laughter. To be fair, the Silent Circle guys are open about the fact that their product wasn’t for everyone. But I was as impressed by their incredibly low latency video calling over 3G (high compression) and by some quite nice messaging interfaces. And the “burn message” functionality is something that could well have a widespread consumer use case, if anyone else were able to make it work.
With that, I’m burning this message. It will self destruct in a few words…
Keith Dyer
Editor, Mobile Europe