The previous article " How to avoid blocking in WhatsApp ", although it received many drawbacks, nevertheless within 2 days was the most read article on Habré - it gained more than 20 thousand views.
So I decided to keep talking about the different ways of using WhatsApp for business while
Everyone who is interested - welcome to cat.
Some statistics first
In Russia, 40% of subscribers switch from mobile calls to instant messengers.
In total, 40% of Russian users make voice calls using instant messengers more often or as often as over cellular communications. Only 11% of users do not like to use instant messengers and do it only when there is no cellular connection.
These are the conclusions made by Ernst & Young specialists during a study of the broadband Internet access market in Moscow and other Russian cities with a population of more than 100 thousand people. In general, the company concludes that it has accelerated the transition of users from cellular to messengers when it comes to voice calls. This process leads to the loss of income by operators, statistics, as well as the ability to recognize and optimize encrypted video traffic (hello Yarovaya). The most popular messenger in the course of the study was WhatsApp - it is used by 65% of respondents. In total, the study surveyed 1.5 thousand Russians who use the mobile Internet. 30% of respondents live in Moscow. The study was conducted in February 2018.
I dare to assume that for almost 3 years the number of such users has increased significantly.
Why did this trend appear?
Yes, for a very simple reason - with a zero balance of a cellular operator, you can also make voice and audio calls to your relatives and friends (hello to mobile operators!).
If you have Wi-Fi or unused mobile internet, you can also continue making calls via WhatsApp.
For some unknown reason, opsos (Operators of Sotovaya Communication) only aggravate the situation, offering in their tariff plans a very small number of minutes and a fairly large number of gigabytes of mobile Internet.
Apparently, they hope that people, having quickly spent their minutes on pure GSM, will rush to replenish their balance.
Yeah, right now! (from)
In addition to free calls on WhatsApp, one more bonus was unexpectedly added - your calls cannot be listened to and recorded, as it would be the case with pure GSM (hello Yarovaya!)
Why and who needs it?
We thought and decided - what if we use this opportunity for business as well - to communicate with IP PBX and users with WhatsApp they already have?
Why should a business use GSM or landline numbers - after all, the user will have to pay for such calls, especially on landline lines (RIP PSTN!).
As a result, we have a working solution with the following scenarios:
- — , , . — — - — .
- IP WhtasApp
- SIP WhatsApp
- IP — WhatsApp, .
How does it work?
A small digression.
Now there are, as it were, two worlds, two ecosystems for communications - the first is messengers, which still use a phone number as a login and which are used mainly by individuals and the second - the so-called Business Telephony - is virtual PBX, PBX on Asterisk and other SIP compatible platforms.
But despite the fact that both messengers and business telephony use phone numbers, in each case they are different entities.
The problem is that these two worlds do not intersect, although both do the same thing - they connect people.
Those. you cannot make a call, for example, from WhatsApp to a VOIP IP PBX user - although in both cases IP telephony is used, telephone numbers and the same voice or video codecs are used.
To communicate, the messenger user must leave the messenger ecosystem and use either PSTN or GSM, that is, make a paid call. Or make a paid call from a messenger (for example Viber Out), which will eventually go through the old PSTN or GSM as well. A strange situation at a time when the user can and is already used to calling friends and family for free.
Why it happens?
The answer is simple - messengers have enough of their audience and they do not want any integration with others. Already, the total audience of instant messengers is about 5 billion people. On the contrary, messengers are forced to use only them, there are no prerequisites for the unification of messengers. In other words, each messenger pulls the blanket over itself.
However, there is one exception - this is ... Skype.
They have a paid service called Skype Connect, which only allows you to receive calls from Skype users to your PBX, i.e. for incoming calls only.
But few people remember that before buying Skype, Microsoft had another option for outgoing calls from SIP to Skype - it was called Skype For Asterisk (SFA).
It was made and sold by Digium - yes, the one that developed Asterisk.
It was a paid software key module that was registered in Asterisk and you could make calls to any Skype number from Asterisk.
Unfortunately, immediately after buying Skype, literally the next week, Microsoft canceled all these licenses and they turned into a pumpkin. I also had about 10 of these licenses bought from Digium for $ 60 each and they also stopped working.
To be continued...