It was reported during the last month about Viber’s user has reached 200 million in number. Company is growing with half a million new users joining the service every day. It was unclear about the company’s planning to generate revenue from these users since the app it offers is free.
According to Geektime’s report, it has been reported that Viber has come up with a formula to monetize their massive user base by taking control of some of the lines through which Viber users calls’ pass through. If the Viber app is installed on your device, it could very well be that you will begin to receive regular phone calls through your Viber app as well as Viber calls, if the caller is using a carrier for which Viber has taken over Call Termination activities.
Working of Viber is explained below with its beneficiary tactics
Initially, one has to require a little background into the workings of the international phone ecosystem in general. Every call that is made will be filtered first and foremost through a wireless carrier who transfers the call to a PBX central redirector. The PBX in turn, decides which ‘terminator’ to send the call through based on inter-corporate contracts. The terminator that receives the call from the PBX, then routes the call to the receiving wireless carrier who transfers it to the receiving phone.
The entity to which the PBX server forwards a call is called a terminator, and the process is called Call Termination. Companies looking to be terminators must work out deals with local carriers for the right to be the ones transferring outgoing calls from one specific country to another for that carrier. Terminator airtime revenue varies from country to country.
Geektime has got information that the company has started a pilot project with a Dutch mobile operator to become a terminator for the carrier, conducting its own Call Termination processes.
To check out the working of new business model of viber, one will be getting call from outside contact list of Viber. As far as the user is concerned, Viber’s entrance into the global terminator market might increase competition and influence pricing wars which can lower your international calling rates in general.
As far as local-to-local calls are concerned, Viber’s move will not have much impact as the regulation dynamic to break into such markets are often complex and tightly controlled by the local carriers.
An official update from Viber, “Viber is running multiple tests at any given point in time aimed at exploring innovative ways to integrate with the standard telephony system and offer new and exciting service. The service mentioned in the article is one such test that was run with an extremely small number of users, reflecting less than 0.0002% of call volume on the Viber system. If we ever made this service commercially available it will be on an optional basis.”