Mark,
The market for prepaid wireless has taken off within the last year. As I mentioned before, most of the large wireless telcos have already signed contracts this past year for prepaid wireless services. Since these services require no equipment purchase for the carrier, they can easily switch to another service provider(Brite for example)once the contract period has expired. For this reason, vendors are attempting to get the telcos under 2 or 3 year contract terms. This could have an effect on how much take-away business Brite can land over the next two years. Also, don't forget that a lot of the mid-sized and small carriers are still up for grabs at this point. If Brite Mgmt. is agressive, they can capture a good portion of the remaining market.
As for voice activated dialing(VAD), I think that the technology is just maturing to the point where it can start to show some substantial revenue for the carriers. To date, the service has not substantially penetrated the subscriber base. This has been largely due to two factors. The first has been the carrier's inexperience in selling enhanced services that require some user training upfront along with the sales staff. The prepaid service vendors are attacking this problem by forming alliances with national retail chains that can distribute the prepaid airtime services for the carrier. The administration and marketing of the service is a big headache the carriers would like to avoid. The second reason has been the state of the technology itself. In a wireless environment, the accuracy of the vocie recognizer algorithms is commonly in the 80 to 90% range. Chances were pretty good that it would miss a digit if you were dialing long distance(10 digits). For this reason, most of the successful implementations of VAD have been on digital only networks(AT&T). With most of the wireless subscriber base still utilizing analog only phones, it will be hard to deeply penetrate the market. Given the large distribution of digital phones by the new wireless carriers, this ratio is declining at a rapid pace. I think this bodes well for ALL applications that are going to utilize voice interfaces.
Regards,
Crash |
