Jumping the gun on Mobile free phone

One of mobile’s biggest shortcomings is that, while more and more people use them, no one can call a free phone number. This has gone from being a bit of a pain in the butt to now becoming a business critical issue for everyone from TV shows to call centres to everyday businesses.

The prospect, then, of the ability to finally make free calls – paid for by the recipient – from mobile is one that has everyone in the telemedia industry and most people in any consumer facing vertical market jumping up and down with excitement.

So imagine everyone’s delight when MIG and Orca Digital both announced at the top of the year that they were now ready for business with five digit voice shortcodes that would let businesses have easy to remember numbers that callers could contact them on using mobile, for free.

But to truly work it has to be a cross network solution: each operator has to allow it to happen via their network so that the business offering the number to the punters can be called by anyone with a UK mobile, regardless of the network they are on.

And this isn’t in place yet.

Claims that these services are live and work cross network are simply not true right now. Everything Everywhere, the UK’s biggest carrier by user numbers, and Virgin Mobile, which uses Everything Everywhere’s T-Mobile network, are not on board with this yet – and are furious.

There is no big issue with the carrier: it will be signed up to free phone voice short codes by, it says, the end of Q1 and thenceforth these services will run and be cross network. But right now claims that it can be done are, to put it euphemistically, economic with the actualite.

Now a few calls to those concern finds that their exuberance to get these services out there has seen them jump the gun. Speaking to them they say that they are just announcing that they will be able to run these services once EE is on board and are just priming the market.

But since this is a business that every aggregator is going to look to get into because of the massive potential it has, many noses have been put out of joint, not just at EE who had to field calls from aggregators and customers as to why they weren’t told.

Moves like this, while not born out of malice, are very damaging to the industry. Telemedia already has ‘issues’ with mainstream business: this sort of premature marketing doesn’t help mend that.

What is surprising is that it came from two very well respected companies who don’t normally go in for this sort of thing.

Anyway, enough finger pointing. No one meant any harm, but it serves as a lesson in making sure you are clear with what you say you are doing. Many publications fell for it (including me, earlier in the week) and helped create this storm. Let’s hope this isn’t a taste of the tenor of the year ahead or people like me won’t know who to believe.