WhatsApp kills the voice star
With blackouts degrading mobile phone signals, many have turned elsewhere — and it’s hurting the operators
HBut calls through WhatsApp do connect, and are increasingly most South Africans’ first choice for phoning
ow often have you tried to make a call during stage six load-shedding and just not been able to connect? This year it’s happening more often as the cellular networks struggle to keep up with the rolling blackouts. It takes longer to recharge base-station batteries — if they haven’t been stolen — when the load-shedding stages increase the number of hours without electricity. The weaker power degrades the quality of the cellular signals.
But calls through WhatsApp do connect, and are increasingly most South Africans’ first choice for phoning.
This voice substitution, as it’s called by the industry, has been happening for a decade and has been more pronounced in the past few years. People had begun to text more, thanks to Mxit and then BlackBerry’s BBM, though computer users had been using Skype, MSN Messenger and ICQ for even longer. By the time WhatsApp arrived, in about 2012 — it was acquired later by Facebook for $19bn — South Africans were text savvy.
But for the past few years, people have been using WhatsApp’s voice notes and making (mostly) free calls. You still pay for the data, but the expense is negligible compared with the per-minute cost of a voice call.
Voice notes are an unexpected triumph. People who sit in meetings or are on calls for much of their work day hate them, for obvious reasons: you can’t just read them and reply. But for millions for whom typing is more difficult, voice notes are the easiest way to send a quick, short message, and it’s easy for others to reply in this way as well. It’s like an asynchronous phone call — with long delays between responses.
I think it’s one of the smartest adaptations of technology. Many millions are making fewer calls the old-fashioned way. Video might have “killed the radio star”, but WhatsApp is killing voice revenue for mobile operators.
Vodacom Group CEO Shameel Joosub tells TechCentral: “Voice is transitioning to voice over data. More importantly, voice is being cannibalised by Messenger and WhatsApp. That is putting added pressure on telecom firms globally.”
But it doesn’t help if there is no power to make calls, as MTN reported — its results for the first six months of 2023 show a drop of 16% year on year for the first quarter.
“The extent of power outages in the country remained elevated, with 90 days of load-shedding during the quarter, compared with 14 in the first quarter of 2022,” the company says. “This heavily disrupted network availability, which affected MTN South Africa’s growth trajectory, especially in its voice segment.”
This trajectory is only going to get worse, with no end in sight to load-shedding and with calling via WhatsApp gaining more traction as its quality increases.
I remember those early days, when WhatsApp was so unreliable at delivering messages that telecom executives sniggered at it. They thought it was a threat only to the vastly overpriced SMSes that had been a cash cow for too many years. Like all great disruptions, nobody saw it coming for ye olde voice revenue.