We might all be attached at the hip to our mobile phones but making calls is becoming an ancient art.
This was the conclusion of Mehmet Balos, chief marketing officer at Genband, who revealed analyst figures showing how the likes of texting, and increasingly social networking, were encroaching on the voice market.
"If you look at the amount of minutes spent on Facebook last year, it was almost the same as the number of voice minutes," he said during a presentation at this week's NetEvents in Barcelona.
"There were also one and half SMS messages for every voice minute of last year."
More and more, data such as video or email was dominating the network and voice was falling away, Balos claimed.
However, voice was still an integral part of mobile communications and telecoms companies needed to be aware of this or face losing a massive revenue stream.
"Companies still use voice money to pay to build the data networks," he added.
"When LTE [Long Term Evolution] was designed, [the innovators] only talked about data, they don't have a voice solution. We have to find a solution... as it is voice that pays the bills."
This week's Inside the Enterprise column by Stephen Pritchard also claimed data was now driving the network, not voice. Read the article here.
