Telenet and Liberty Global recently got into a spat about how much it should cost for Liberty to buy the rest of the company. The issue was over the mobile strategy of Telenet going forwards.
An external valuation for the Telenet shareholders was conducted by UK bank Lazards, and Liberty said that to achieve that valuation Telenet would need to increase its cellular market share from 1% to 16% by 2018. And that in order to do that it would have to steal the majority of cellular net ads across the country.
But as we hear more and more about the mobile strategy of companies like Telenet, and Liberty Global itself, we are perhaps more inclined to believe that cable companies can be disruptive in the mobile market in Europe, in the same way that Free has been in France.
One of the things Telenet is testing now is its own App, from a company called Triiing, which allows WiFi calls to be made using VoIP. While there are other WiFi calling systems such as Viber and Skype, they can only to people over data links, who have the same App and are also on the internet. Instead this system attributes calls to the landline systems of Telenet, so you gets fixed calls, many of which are free if you are a Telenet phone customer, to mobiles and other fixed lines and where they are not free, they are very cheap.
If you add to that the idea of Homespots which is very advanced in Belgium, and began at Telenet, where home WiFi is in the process of being converted into about 600,000 hotspots, then suddenly most cellular calls in Belgium could be made over WiFi. Then Telenet would have a disruptive mobile phone strategy that may cost callers virtually nothing in monthly charges. Not only would it pick up all the new customers, but it would force churn at other cellular operators.
What would be ideal is to have cellular voice offload, whereby the phone customer just calls any number it likes, and if is in reach of WiFi it automatically loads the App and uses WiFi VoIP and if not, it uses cellular. But failing that, for a hotspot cloud as dense as this, customers might just use Triiing for all their calls.
Most WiFi offload in cellular is not about voice, it is about data and especially html and video files, but it looks like Telenet is determined to go the whole hog. We have said in the past, that while operators like neighboring KPN in the Netherlands, has been hurt by systems like Viber and WhatsApp, operators what want to reduce the price and steal market share, will embrace such services and it looks to us that Telenet is preparing such a strategy.
The Triiing app enables Telenet customers to call all mobile and fixed numbers from their smartphone, via any WiFi network, at Telenet fixed line rates.
Triiing is the operator’s first step in offering mobile Voice Over IP services, and it runs on iOS now and Android later.
Using the app requires a Telenet fixed line in order to make calls at the same rates as the home phone line, this includes free calling to all Belgian numbers and European landlines on weekdays after 4 pm, in the weekends and on public holidays.
All of which perhaps suggests that not only was Lazards right about the cellular chances of Telenet, but it may have under estimated its potential.