I get no calls, no sms and therefore no voicemail, no indication that someone has tried / is trying to get hold of me.

For those of us lucky to live in Europe or the US there are alternate VM services to the operator, ones which by the very process of being delivered outside of the operator’s network offer hope.

I’m not going to run through them all – there are quite a few, but essentially they fall into two camps;

• Camp 1: Send you a copy of the actual vocal recording (and notifications of it’s arrival) via email or sms.

• Camp 2: Send you a transcripted text version of said recording (again via email or sms).

A recent discussion I had with Ewan over at Mobile Industry Review revolved around whether a particular company in Camp 1 (HulloMail.com) was actually a competitor with one in Camp 2 (SpinVox).   In my opinion they are most definately competitors with each other. Why, well they compete for my attention with a service that is designed to replace the operator’s own voicemail, and realistically (and practically) I or any other user will choose just one provider.

More importantly BOTH camps offer and are much needed competition to the operators (as a note HulloMail.com have and I believe still do offer operators a whitebox version for integration).

However it’s not the competition that interests me so much as how these services create competition.  They are both disruptive in that the services are provided outside the network, at the edge if you will, are self-provisioned by the user and have business models that draw attention away from the stock operator service.

Why they work is simple: there are users like me for whom the standard integrated voicemail just fails badly and services using alternate delivery channels solve a critical problem.

And unless the operators quickly learn that their current closed network practises & cynical marketing (free voicemail – really?) are actually creating a marketplace for edge of network services then those wonderful cash-cow positions  they hold will rapidly be eroded by the innovative.