Teams Insider

Teams Phone Mobile - what's coming in 2024 with Vandana Thomas

Vandana Thomas leads mobility strategy for Teams Phone at Microsoft, working with operators worldwide on Teams Phone Mobile. She reviews the 2023 operator and market rollout, how Copilot and other Teams Phone features land on the mobile native dialler, and what is planned for 2024 including SMS arch

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners and telephony architects planning mobile voice strategy, and UC partners or operators evaluating Teams Phone Mobile against Operator Connect, Direct Routing or Calling Plans.

Guest: Vandana Thomas — Group Product Manager, Calling and Operator Integrations (Teams Phone Mobile product leader), Microsoft

Many thanks to Luware, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Teams Phone Mobile is live in nine countries with only six operators, because operator partnerships have been leveraged across multiple geographies — Rogers (Canada) and Telia (Sweden) first, then Verizon (US), Deutsche Telekom (Germany), Swisscom (Switzerland and now Liechtenstein), BT (UK), Telia Denmark and Telia Norway. ▶ 1:36
Contracts are signed for at least 10 more markets in 2024, roughly doubling coverage, and Microsoft is deliberately adding second and third operators per country — two more UK operators are coming — because large enterprises hold mobile contracts with all the major carriers and don't want to be locked to one after an exclusivity period. ▶ 3:06
Copilot for Teams Phone flows through to Teams Phone Mobile, but not on the mobile native dialler endpoint today: the user has to uplift the call into Teams for Copilot to be available. It is also invoke-only, not always-on, mirroring fixed-line Teams Phone behaviour. ▶ 6:41
Thomas's position on AI on calls is explicit opt-in, ideally per call, with recording-always-on reserved for compliance-driven organisations where users know the rules — the design principle from the first line written was user-behaviour-centric choice over native dialler versus Teams. ▶ 8:15
The hero persona is the mobile/field worker, not the knowledge worker: Thomas notes she takes maybe one PSTN call a day and is a "nice to have" case, which matters because operators charge a per-user uplift (roughly $4–5) that finance teams have to justify against fixed-line options. Expect that premium to commoditise as more operators enter. ▶ 13:26
Adoption is skewed to organisations with large mobile workforces — beverage and bottling companies, automotive, trucking, grocery/retail chains, large consulting firms, wealth management and banks, plus notable interest from state and local government in the US and Canada. ▶ 14:57
All four Teams Phone connectivity types — Calling Plans, Direct Routing, Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile — can be mixed per user in the same tenant, and Teams Phone features such as shared calling, private line and multiple numbers per user extend the model beyond one number per person. ▶ 17:02
Platform features announced at Ignite are inherited on the mobile number, including voice isolation for noisy on-the-road calls, and protected/prioritised voicemail with transcription, voicemail-to-email and archival — no extra SKU required, which addresses the perennial operator voicemail objection. ▶ 20:41
For 2024, native SMS is being approached archival-first: messages can already be sent and received on the native dialler, but archiving requires an arrangement with the operator, and unblocking that is prioritised for FSI. Also on the list: better BYOD/eSIM experiences with operators and OEMs (US device locking remains a blocker), dual-radio handling, and 5G slicing and QoS boosts. ▶ 22:48