Singapore’s top tier telco provider, has just entered the OTT market. But Why?

Wavee, Singapore Telecommunications Ltd.’s (Singtel) communication app, is the latest entry into the crowded OTT market. Described as an integrated next-generation service that will allow users to make high-quality voice and video calls.

What does that mean to the rest of the IM/Calling/Social Chatting apps out there?

Not much apparently, with little visibility apart from the couple of newspaper articles written about them. Many critics also insisting that there is little reason for them to migrate from their existing platforms to Wavee, and that Wavee has nothing unique about it that will draw users away from incumbents.

But that could exactly be the point.

Singapore is a small market, with a population of 5.47 million, and capturing any portion of this small population isn’t going to create waves in the industry. But delve deeper into the figures, and you’ll realise that a sizeable portion of that population, 1.6 million, arise from non-residents. 

Foreigners, ranging from employment pass holders to foreign domestic workers and you may begin to get a glimpse of SingTel’s greater plan.   

Sure Wavee has what WhatsApp, Line, Skype, WeChat has. But do all those apps on their own have what Wavee has? Probably Line and WeChat come the closest, but they do lose out on certain features. The ability to attach documents to chats (WeChat), and sketches (Line) are some of the features lacking.

Perhaps the real market for Wavee, will be the one that is synonymous with fast growth and a tech-savvy market. Members of our non-resident populace, who arrive from the developing nations in the region.

Wavee is waiving data charges (till 9^th July 2015), while providing free app-to-app Video calls. You can be sure that there will be a ton of these price-sensitive users downloading the app. The next thing that Wavee does is to provide high quality calls and video calls. This aspect of the OTT market has largely been out of the hands of the developer as data connections and the like are in the hands of the Telcos.

But wait, Wavee is developed by a Telco, and a nation-wide top tier Telco nonetheless. If Wavee can uphold its promise of higher quality calls, it would have seeded a precedence in this space. Future and current developers will have to update their codecs and be able to compress their data packets further, in order to emulate the quality that Wavee can potentially provide.

Wavee’s next patch also encompasses the ability for Wavee users to dial in to landlines and mobile phone numbers, which will be a huge deal for these developing overseas markets who may not have access to a very good data connection.

Lastly let us not forget that Telco revenues have been cannibalized by OTT players for a long time now, and Telcos have been playing off the back foot for years. This test by SingTel will be the first of its kind, and may be the business model that many other Telcos are eyeing to take off. 

This is essentially a feasibility test, and where else but Uniquely Singapore can you find a small controlled population with access to developing markets to test such a high risk product offering.

And when Wavee does take off, it will already have markets favourable to Wavee, thanks to seeding plans done today in Singapore.