Wireless carrier Sprint said it will stop charging a call-forwarding fee for its subscribers to use their Sprint phones to access third party voice call services including Google Voice, Skype and Vonage.
“While we think we have a compelling voice offering ourselves, we’re not going to make it difficult for consumers to be able to use these other services,” said Steve Elfman, president of network operations at Sprint, in a keynote address at the carrier’s 2009 Open Developer Conference in Santa Clara, Calif.
Effective in mid-November, Sprint will no longer charge for call-forwarding to another number than the subscriber’s cell phone number. This change will give Sprint customers the opportunity to access third-party voice services, including the voicemail feature in Google Voice. Launched last March, Google Voice allows someone to pick their own phone number and have calls to that number sent to several devices, including a cell phone, even if that cell phone has a different number assigned to it by the carrier.
Sprint is also going to drop call-forward fees for Skype and Vonage, which are so-called Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, in which calls go over the Internet rather than the carrier’s network. In an interview with me, Elfman explained there is no impact on Sprint’s voice plan revenue from enabling these alternative services because under its recently launched “Any Mobile, Anytime” pricing plan, subscribers pay a flat fee for unlimited minutes per month.
In the interview, Elfman explained this is a part of the larger strategy not to impede innovation customers seem to want: “We think these kinds of services are compelling to consumers … and so the business model is getting more people excited about using these kinds of capabilities is much better from a financial standpoint.”
The welcome mat has not always been rolled out for these third party voice apps. Apple in July removed Google Voice and some related apps from its App Store, saying they duplicated the functionality of the iPhone. In another move, AT&T, the exclusive U.S. carrier for the iPhone, blocked Skype on the iPhone, limiting it to use within range of a wi-fi hot spot. AT&T reversed itself Oct. 7, but said it was in response to customer needs, not the Federal Communications Commission looking into the matter.
The three-day conference, which concludes Wednesday, is for developers of software applications that run on devices that run on Sprint’s network. Elfman also announced a new open development approach, enabling developers to write applications to run on multiple mobile platforms, including Google’s open-source Android, the new Palm webOS , Java ME, RIM, which runs on BlackBerry smartphones, and Windows Mobile.
In the past, U.S. carriers where the gatekeepers deciding which phones and apps ran on their networks, particularly the first-generation “feature phones,” before smartphones came along that combined voice and data applications on the devices. Now carriers like Sprint are all about openness.
“The consumer will pick the winners in the application space,” Elfman told his audience of developers. “The innovation starts with you, not us.”
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