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Mobile industry analysts Ajit Jaokar and Chetan Sharma have published a new white paper titled 'Mobile VoIP – Approaching The Tipping Point.'

Over the course of the last decade, the paper finds, mobile devices have become the most ubiquitous consumer electronic devices ever invented.

Probably didn't need to do a study to determine that. Yet the research finds that, 'even in the poorest of the nations, mobile phones have evolved from being a luxury to an indispensible necessity,' and that multifunction phones are so common that now, 'the paradigm of communication itself has undergone a significant transformation from just voice to multimode interaction.'

That basically means people don't just talk on phones anymore.

Most of the growth is coming from mobile data services, the paper finds, which have 'evolved significantly from simple text messaging to multimode communication involving text, VoIP, video, and other forms of messaging and social networking interactions.'

For service providers, then, 'it is no longer sufficient to rely on voice revenues,' the study's authors conclude, 'but providers need to think communications in a much more holistic form. Once the transport layer becomes all-IP in a given network, voice is nothing but another application that will work and interact with other applications in tandem often in real-time.'

Voice is still the killer app, of course, we'll never want to do without that. And 'the fear of cannibalization are unwarranted,' Jaokar and Sharma find, 'as our research shows that by offering consumers comprehensive services, the lifetime value of customers can be increased, churn can be reduced, and the overall value proposition of the operator increases.'

The paper looks at the evolution of the Internet, mobile broadband, and mobile communication and 'how consumer behavior and expectations have changed,' the authors say adding that they discuss 'the emergence and the role of VoIP in further detail before we delve into the intricacies of communication economics,' and 'dispel some myths and layout the framework for how operators should approach the new communications world.'