Aswath Weblog

Yahoo!BB phone is a Different Service

Andy Abramson quotes an AP story on Yahoo!BB phone service. According to that story, 80% of VoIP users are in Japan. We all know that that can not be true. After all, Skype has 35 million registered users and Yahoo!BB has only 4.5 million. More seriously though, Yahoo!BB phone service is different than the garden variety VoIP service providers and they are also different from Skype.

First of all, Yahoo!BB phone is not a replacement for the traditional service. All the subscribers get POTS from the incumbent, DSL service from Yahoo!BB. The phone service comes with BB service whether you want it or not. That is why the subscriber number is high. This caught even some bloggers in the VON forum by surprise, The DSL modem has built-in ATA with some smarts: it fails over to POTS under failure conditions, emergency calls are forwarded to the POTS line. But all other calls (it seems that in Japan even local calls are metered) are switched over to Yahoo!BB network before being terminated at the PSTN, at a reduced tariff. In other words it is an unadulterated arbitrage play. “Mind you, there is nothing wrong with that.” You will never catch them saying that PSTN is a dinosaur, unlike some of the VoIP evangelists. They are also not Skype because the only way you get the phone service is if you subscribe to BB service.

But they share something with Skype. Since their tariffs are usage based, the subscriber count is not consequential, except for mC² marketing. So the really useful metric is ARPU. As far as I know Skype’s number is not publicly known. But Yahoo!BB phone numbers are known – about 1100 yen per month. Interestingly it is almost the same amount that Skype is targeting.