Whatsapp And FB Deal Educated Many – Voice Initiative Must Brace For Surprises In India

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The acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook attracted pro and cons assessment. As I mentioned in my previous blog that Facebook intention was simple and that was to eat out potential competitor. The deal brought Oracle acquisition of PeopleSoft, Siebel and SunMicrosystem to protect their turf and pricing power.


Facebook also realizes that their major chunk of active user base is from Emerging countries including India and WhatsApp India user base is around 35 Million. Whatever is the deal proposition but it offered enough insight about hidden revenue potential by indirectly targeting user base.

It also opened multiple open issues which industries and regulators are trying to answer. Some Of Them Are As Follows

  • What is the use of UASL regime in India if any OTT players comes in and capture market with minimum to no investments?
  • Is there any regulatory loop hole which is being used by OTT players?
  • Do OTT players know about Indian regulatory environment and its implications?
  • Did regulators neglected OTT segment and missed to regulate the same?
  • Why telecom operators are forced to buy in spectrum to offer Voice and text services when the same can be realized without buying any spectrum?
  • Why regulators missed to identify the revenue leakage from OTT applications where OTT players used data path to reach out to user base and indirectly inflicted Mobile Operators with major revenue drainage?
  • Why Applications segment is non-regulated?
  • Why OTT players using Telecom network path as delivery mechanism are not being forced to buy in licenses?
  • And Many more


The above queries are only few one and it clearly offers one answer that regulators must be more visible in order to maintain level playing field. Interestingly, major service providers as well as government officials also started talking about regulating OTT players.
One must recognize that OTT players offer great level of value to end user but at the same level inflicted major impact in negative way to Telecom ecosystem.


The recent announcement by WhatsApp that they would be coming out with Voice enabled service. With the attached service like social networking, messaging and voice, Facebook may kill their competitors.

It is widely expected that Facebook may face lots of hurdle from Indian Telecom ecosystem even though Facebook CEO met Indian Telecom Sector visionary to expand Internet.org initiative.
I am pretty sure that the Indian Telecom regulators, MHA, Intelligence Agencies will not leave any stone unturned to make sure of compliance as well as monetization for government.

It would be interesting how Blackberry position its BBM service against impeding move by WhatsApp

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