WeChat enters voice call market with new app
- By Zhang Rui
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E-mail China.org.cn, November 13, 2014
China's biggest instant message service provider launched a new mobile phone app Tuesday, promising to offer a free phone call service to users while cutting into mobile phone service market.
WeChat, a mobile text and voice messaging communication service developed by Tencent in China, put out the new app, named WeChat Phone Book.
WeChat had 438 million active users as of August 2014, with 70 million outside of China. The app, with its free text and multimedia text messaging service feature, has gradually taken over the short message service market since its release in January 2011, which worried mobile and telecom service providers.
The WeChat Phone Book service became overloaded in just half a day when millions of users flocked to download and activate it on their mobile phones. The tests show that the quality of a phone conversation sounds best when both callers are using Wi-Fi. If one of the callers uses a mobile Internet connection or a 2G signal, or has poor reception, the conversation quality will not be good and the other person may not be able to hear clearly.
Although some viewed the "free phone call" feature as a potentially revolutionary feature that could take the voice call market from the mobile phone service providers, it is not really free after all. Tests indicate that every call uses about 300 kb - 400 kb mobile traffic per minute. If a user makes 20 minutes of calls every day, the monthly bandwidth consumption would be 240MB, which would cost more than regular calls with telecom service providers.
The word of "free" here means measuring a phone call not by the number of minutes but by the quantity of data used.
A Tencent spokesman said the WeChat Phone Book is actually an upgraded version of QQ Contact Book. QQ is another widely popular instant web messenger in China. The new app will integrate contacts on WeChat with other contacts in a common phone book.
According to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, statistics show that from January to August 2014, 42.7 percent of the income of the three major Chinese telecom companies was from voice communication services, 2 percent lower than last year.
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