Gartner tells us what we already knew about Mobile VoIP

This morning the Gartner group dropped some hot new knowledge on us about the growing threat mobile VoIP presents to incumbent carriers.

Wait. That’s nothing new. We’ve known about that for years.

Gartner’s announcement did shed light on what they consider the actual market opportunity for mobile VoIP services to be, however, as well as where these where all these mobile VoIP minutes will be originating from.

• According to Gartner research director Akshay Sharma, in ten years more than half of mobile voice traffic will be carried end-to-end using VoIP. That’s approximately $345 billion dollars worth of minutes.
• Of this mobile voice traffic, 30 percent will be driven through third parties such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others who will look to add voice as a value added feature to their current offerings.

These numbers are a little misleading if you’re a mobile VoIP provider salivating over the market opportunity these next eight years.

Incumbent carriers are already leveraging VoIP behind the scenes and will likely ramp-up their efforts to provide mobile VoIP services themselves once third party services from companies like Truphone and even Skype eat away at their voice revenues – cutting into the opportunity for third party players.

This is fine by many current mobile VoIP providers such as Mobivox and Nimbuzz who have positioned themselves as value added platforms for carriers – not direct competitors.

Regardless of how the players are shaping up, mobile VoIP still has some technical hurdles preventing it from realizing its full market potential. Many users are still struggling with the awkward nature of many of the services – something that will only improve with time and better technology.

Until that time mobile VoIP will continue to hold promise. But you already knew that.