Facebook is about to become an Associate Member of the GSMA. Facebook will be joining the likes of Ericsson, Alcatel Lucent and other mobile suppliers as associates in the operators club that is the GSMA.
Over the Top OTT players are making increasing inroads into mobile carriers revenue on one hand while helping to drive demand for smartphones and data connectivity on the other. Facebook is not such an overt competitor to mobile carrier’s services as say Skype or WhatsApp and they add to mobile operator’s data traffic and provide a popular service for smartphone users. As such Facebook should be more comfortable inside the GSMA tent than many other OTT players and companies like Apple and Google all of who benefit massively, as well as contributing to the booming mobile industry.
It is interesting that in a Mobile Squared White Paper on OTT here it is claimed that the Microsoft owned Skype is costing the telcos $36Bn a year (and counting) in lost revenues mainly providing service for which its own annual revenue is $2Bn. It seems likely that Skype would be as welcome in the GSMA as wolf in the hen house. But you never know.
Research firm Ovum predicts that SMS numbers world wide will peak at 7.8 trillion in 2014 and then gradually decline as more people use newer OTT forms of text messaging. Ovum also estimates that social messaging will reduce mobile operators messaging revenue by $USD32.6 billion in 2013.