One of the themes of my mega-post on Friday “Google’s Big Idea” (which has been quite extensively linked to) was VoIP. As VoIP calls increasingly become available on our phones, it’s going to cause real revenue damage to the incumbent operators. This will be the case whether or not Google offers free net access to all, as part of its ever bolder and bigger expansion plans.

So it’s interesting to read this article in Time yesterday, which has few choice snippets.

Analyst firm, In-Stat, forecasts that global shipments of mobile phones with wi-fi will hit 13.5 million in 2007, leap to 52.8 million in 2008, and surge to 136 million by 2010. They also say that this could actually be pretty conservative, even though it’s an explosive growth curve. But obviously, in comparison to the 2 billion phones in circulation, it’s not going to be a big problem in lost revenues for operators in the next 5 years.

That assumes that something like the Google paradigm-busting scenario doesn’t happen, of course.

However, sometimes it’s easier to understand these things on a micro-level. Athens airport has equpped its employees with wifi enabled phones, allowing them to call each other on-site free. This saves them a whopping Euros 163,000 ($104,000). Put it another way and that’s $104,000 out of Greece’s operators’ economy. Replicate this for several large enterprise clients and you have a significant issue.

With numbers like these, it makes a very compelling business case and we may suddenly see a huge leap in wifi phones - far bigger than anyone’s currently forecasting.

The only fly in the ointment that I can see is quality. I’ve used Skype extensively and while it’s great because it’s free, the quality is frankly, very poor. If I wanted to make an important call or not appear like a cheapskate to the person I was phoning, I’d never use VoIP.

Where quality doesn’t matter though is data - there would never be a reason why you wouldn’t download data (from a ringtone to an email) over a cheaper or free network. And let’s just remember where operators have been telling us for the last 5 years where their growth will come from - that’s right, from data. Supposing if the data revenue boom everyone’s expecting never happened? Supposing that the majority of data was downloaded free, via wifi or P2P Bluetooth? This would mean flat revenues at best for the operators, which wouldn’t please investors one iota.

But it’s also great to see at least one operator facing up to this in mature and sensible way. O2’s CTO, Dave Williams says “In the long term, as part of an evolution, we’ll go to VoIP-enabled over the phone,”. We’ve written nice things about O2 several times recently (here and here) and it seems they’ve done it again - by leading the field in their thinking.

The only choice operators can make is to embrace this change and figure out where they can sit profitably as a link in the new value chain. Denial, as the music execs are kind enough to show us every day, is not an effective business strategy.