Call me maybe

The traditional telephone number, once solely associated with phone calls, has become less central to telecommunications as users shift their communication to other forms, such as texting, voice recording and video calls. The first shift within voice calls was from landlines to mobile phones, which now represent the majority of call volumes. The advent of broadband mobile data with 3G, 4G, and 5G technologies, however, brought an even more profound shift, making mobile video calls and feature-rich mobile messaging seamless, such as integrating voice calls into messaging applications. Therefore, even after a temporary exception to the trend when social interaction was banned during the Covid era, the classic phone call continues to lose popularity to more feature-rich forms of remote communication. Telecommunication operators have been adapting their business models accordingly.

Source: Statista, October 2024.