TeliaSonera to begin charging for VoIP services

Teliasonera Will Begin To Charge For Voip Services

Swedish operator group TeliaSonera has said it will begin charging for VoIP services by the end of May. The firm said that changes in customer behaviour and increasing pressure on voice revenues have led to the decision.

Lars Nyberg, president and CEO said that the firm needs to develop its business models and how it charges for services going forward, and there must be a stronger correlation between usage and pricing of data. 

“TeliaSonera is leading this change towards a new sustainable business model,” he said. “We have been early in introducing tiered pricing of data, lower costs for data roaming and recently openly communicated that we will start to charge for mobile VoIP.” 

The policy will be introduced in Spain within a month and in Sweden for new subscriptions during the summer, Nyberg added. 

Thomas Wehmeier, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, said that although he believes that this type of application-centric pricing is not the way forward, operators do need to evolve the pricing models they are using to charge for data. 

“At the moment, we’re very much in a unit-centric pricing world. You can compare one operator to another on the basis of the volume of data bundled in and the price of that bundle. A transition is needed to a much more value-centric pricing environment, whereby consumers are buying on the basis of the overall value that the operator gives to them. That could typically mean the amount of data being consumed, speed and bundling in data roaming and perhaps the inclusion of some wifi access.” 

He added that operators are still learning how to price in the data market – consumers have only been paying for data in meaningful volumes since around 2006, which means that there’s a lot of evolution still to come. 

“What we see is that customers do attach different levels of value to different types of data session, which can vary according to the type of device they are using, the quality of network they are accessing, where they are, the time of day and also, how much urgency there is for them to do something,” he said. 

“For example, if you’re desperately trying to download a document onto your phone for work, you’re likely to attach a high level of premium to that. So what we see is that this is the direction operators are trying to go; varying pricing according to customers’ perceived levels of value.”