Mobile Converged Rich Communication Services: A Conjoint Analysis

To enable rich communication services, mobile operators are developing various IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS)-based technologies for they fear that their present voice and SMS business will soon be substituted by newer IP-based services from Internet companies. They reason that since the new rich communication services -- such as enhanced presence, group communication and seamless switching between devices and media types within the same communication session -- provide secure and more reliable services than those offered by Internet companies --Skype, What Sapp and Google, for instance-- consumers will readily appreciate their values and consequently use them. To validate these claims, this paper analyzes the results of a conjoint survey among 82 respondents in Netherlands, France and Spain, examines if users are really willing to adopt these rich communication services and, if so, whether or not issues like reliability and security impact their decision to do so. Results indicate that while users are most interested in "presence" features of rich communication services, they hardly appreciate other services like "switching devices" and "media during communication sessions", "file sharing" and "group communication". Still, for any of these services, reliability, security and interoperability are valued as important requirements. These findings contribute to theoretical debate on platform competition.