The Head of Technical Support & Consultancy (TSC) at the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation has said that it will not be easy to satisfy telcos and consumers exclusively on the issue of Over-the-Top (OTT) services.

Martin Koyabe, whose organisation is conducting an on-going OTT research study, said in a video interview with Ghana's National Communications Authority that compromise would have to be made to resolve the issue as he looked at it based on two arguments.

"The way we look at this is, for example, many of the traditional telcos were seeing and they keep seeing that the number of handsets, the number of SIM cards that are being bought is going higher," he says. "However, the revenues that are coming in, through things like for example, the voice, SMS traditional channels of revenues are not going up despite the fact that this has increased. So we know that the other services which of course are OTTs for this case could be slicing off part of that.

"But that is one argument. The other argument is to realise that OTT services use data and therefore, there could be an argument out there that says: Is it the operators who are not innovative enough to create even their own OTTs so that they could be bought by the same users? I think when you slice this argument, you'd come to the conclusion CTO has taken of saying: Let's have a conversation; let's have a study that understands the issues so that we can build the foundations of creating the way forward. In our thinking at the moment and this is very early stages, there is no one size fits all. There'll have to be some exclusivity; there'll have to be some compromise but in actual sense it has to be based on the user because those are the people we are answerable to."

On the argument that buying data should be considered users payment to operators for some aspects of OTT services, Koyabe says he thinks the argument should be opened up a little more in line with certain agreements that already exist between operators and consumers.

He also noted that there has to be a way for operators to innovate how they provide services to the consumers without jeopardising their profit margins and limiting the freedom of access to specific services, with a hint that OTTs have sticky effects on consumers as their addictive applications ensure they come back which could be an advantage.

He touched on the need to ensure that all stakeholders including users, regulators, policy makers and players have a better understanding of what OTTs are so as to identify where they apply and create contentions.

There are three distinctive categories that make up the OTT family from the CTO perspective: those that deal mainly on messaging and voice which bring the most contentious issue of revenue drop common among operators; those that are non-real time applications but provide specific and competitive services such as storage facilities like Dropbox and iCloud; and those that enable the streaming of TV and video content online.