Vonage Mobile App Lets You Call Facebook Friends From iPhone or Android For Free
Vonage, the VoIP company with the head-whacking commercials, has a new app for Android and iOS that lets users make free calls to Facebook friends over 3G and Wi-Fi. Finally, your reward for cultivating that extensive friends list.
Context & Ripple Effects
Vonage built its name selling subscription phone service that replaces the landline, but this app is a different play: it gives away calling for free on iOS and Android, using the Facebook friend list as the address book and routing the audio over 3G or Wi-Fi instead of carrier minutes. The technical path was already proven in January 2010, when fring demonstrated 3G voice and video calls running on the iPhone.
Facebook-based communication apps have a checkered history in this corpus — SMS apps on the platform found little use back in April 2008, though Voicetag did bring working voicemail to Facebook that December. What is new here is who is building it: an incumbent VoIP carrier treating the social graph, which already dominates third-party site logins per July reporting, as a substitute for the phone network's own directory.
First-order effects
- Vonage's addressable audience expands overnight from subscribers paying for a line to anyone with an iPhone, Android handset, and an active Facebook account, at zero marginal cost to the caller.
- Mobile carriers lose billable minutes whenever two friends who would have dialed each other route the call through the app over Wi-Fi or 3G instead.
Second-order effects
- App-based callers like fring and Skype are pushed to match the free-social-calling pitch, accelerating the shift of voice from a metered carrier feature to a bundled software feature.
- Facebook gains leverage without lifting a finger: its identity layer becomes telephony infrastructure, deepening the dependence of communications products on its login graph that July reporting already showed dominating third-party sites.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the phone number stops being the primary handle for personal communication, replaced by platform identities — a structural threat to carrier voice revenue and a concentration of power in whoever owns the social graph.
- Regulators and carriers face a growing arbitrage question as voice traffic migrates onto data plans priced flat, eroding the per-minute billing model the entire mobile industry was built on.
The trend: Voice calling is migrating from carrier-switched minutes to application-layer services riding broadband data and social-graph directories, with Facebook's identity network emerging as the default phone book.