VoIP On the Fast Track
6 Mar 2010
According to a recent PointTopic analysis, VoIP hardware users grew by 15% in the first three quarters of 2009 to finally reach a new milestone: 100 million subscribers.John Bosnell, senior analyst at PointTopic said, “The number is close to 110 million today.” Bosnell goes on to say that “This represents steady growth, particularly in the face of the financial turmoil of the recent past. For VoIP though there is an argument that these conditions are an uptake driver since you should be saving money if you’re making your calls over IP.”
Over 22 million of these subscribers are US citizens, but almost as many (21,368,000) come from Japan. More interestingly, France, the third biggest VoIP-using nation, has over 38% of all fixed lines terminated over VoIP, making it by far the biggest relative user of VoIP. According to Bosnell, “It’s competition that’s forced the pace in France and with a combination of an enthusiastic set of suppliers, cost effective bundles, appropriate regulation and a developing infrastructure the same could be seen in any market no matter how entrenched the incumbents.”
On the software side, Skype, the world’s leading softclient VoIP service provider, is also experiencing a boom, with incomes totaling $653 million in quarter 3 of 2009. Although this number may seem relatively small, it becomes far more telling in light of the fact that 90% of Skype’s traffic generates no revenue whatsoever. The primary market beneficiary of this growth is Cisco, which has the leading share of the VoIP market.Although VoIP service has been relatively slow to catch on with many consumers, Bosnell claims that the recent surge of interest has been building for a while and is unlikely to die out anytime soon. As he says, VoIP’s slower-than-expected start is due mainly to “technical issues, by no means resolved even today, regulatory barriers and customer inertia. Many operators have reduced their standard tariffs to cope with the threat of VoIP, which reduces the incentive to switch. Conditions are starting to become common that should allow for faster growth in the next couple of years…There’s certainly enough headroom in enough markets to see adoption increase markedly.”
Jeremy Duke of Synergy’s Market Intelligence, on the other hand, anticipates destructive competition in VoIP’s future. He writes that today’s VoIP market “is driven by the need for integrated, remote IP telephony interconnections. In the future, we anticipate the application of gateway functionality to experience competitive pressure from the growing availability of SIP trunk lines.”
Regardless of VoIP’s long-term future, the numbers certainly show that the industry is doing exceptionally well today, a trend which is unlikely to change in the immediate future.
Written by:Amelia Gurley at comparebusinessproducts.com
VoIP Named As Fastest Growing Technology Of The Past Decade
4 Jan 2010
Ibisworld Research has released a report that VoIP was the fastest growing technology of the past decade based on cumulative revenue growth from 2000 through 2009. According to Ibisworld, the VoIP industry grew at 179035% over the decade while the second largest industry growth was in Search Engines which grew at 1656% – in other words, according to Ibisworld the VoIP industry as a whole grew 100 times more than any other industry between 2000 and 2009. I have to take these numbers with a certain level of skepticism. I am quite prepared to believe that VoIP was indeed the fastest growing industry over that time. VoIP is almost ubiquitous at this point and far more people and businesses depend on phones than on searching the internet. And almost all internet search growth has come at one company (or at most three companies if you want to count Microsoft and Yahoo) while VoIP growth has come at hundreds of companies. The study also notes that VoIP revenues only really started in 2002
The full top ten list is here.
1 Voice Over Internet Protocol Providers (VoIP) 179035%
2 Search Engines 1656%
3 eCommerce & Online Auctions 469%
4 Online Dating & Matchmaking 249%
5 Tank & Armored Vehicle Manufacturing 245%
6 Petrochemical Manufacturing 221%
7 Mining Support 187%
8 Wireless Telecommunications Carriers 183%
9 Biotechnology 182%
10 Warehouse Clubs and Supercenters 147%
The FCC Sees the Future — and It’s VoIP
6 Dec 2009
The Federal Communications Commission is prepping for a future without the circuit-switched network that currently handles most of the landline and wireless calls in this country, and late yesterday released a public notice seeking comments on how to lay the regulatory groundwork for an all-IP communications network. The notice likens the transition to that of moving from analog cell phone service to digital or from analog TV to digital, but it has the potential to be much more disruptive.
That disruption will come from three factors, and the most obvious one will be familiar to us since we just went through the digital TV transition — how do we make sure everyone has access to an IP network as the old circuit-switched network fades away? Cutting off someone’s copper landline isn’t going to fly in many homes. Although the FCC is not proposing any sort of cut-off date, the writing is on the wall for the fate of copper landlines, and laggards will have to be transitioned off those lines as the costs of maintaining the circuit-switched network become too much for carriers to bear.
The transition to an all-IP network also will require a change in the way the FCC collects data and the government disperses communications funds. This a key reason why Universal Service Fund (USF) reform is so crucial, since it could help allocate money from the $7 billion-a-year program across all forms of broadband access. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski hit on this in a speech he gave yesterday saying:
I won’t test this audience’s patience with detail on the USF. The key points for today are these: USF is a multibillion-dollar annual fund that continues to support yesterday’s communications infrastructure. The goal of universality is as important as ever — and to meet our country’s innovation goals, we need to reorient the fund to support broadband communications. This is a thorny issue, with no shortage of practical and statutory challenges.
However, the FCC is also seeking a role in the change that will come from the ability to integrate voice, video and data in unique ways on an all-IP network, the disruption that matters most to entrepreneurs and end users. Just look at what BT is attempting to do or services like Google Voice. This is where FCC efforts in traffic pumping and net neutrality come so strongly into play. In the circuit-switched network, telecommunications firms have certain rules they must follow about terminating calls and emergency access, regulations that VoIP providers don’t always have.
Right now, VoIP is voice, but once voice is mixed with data it becomes what Google calls an Internet application (its defense for blocking certain Google Voice calls to rural areas earlier this year). Since an all-IP network has the potential to turn all of our voice calls into Internet applications, the FCC has to figure out how to handle that traffic in a way that preserves everyone’s right to connect with the people they want to communicate with, and ensure that citizens can turn to the broadband network for help in an emergency.
Comments are due to the FCC by Dec. 21, but as the nation prepares to deliver a National Broadband plan in 77 days, it’s worth keeping this larger picture of our future in mind. It’s gonna be awesome.
Via: GIGAOM
Report: VoIP sales top $20 billion in first half; more growth to come
11 Nov 2009
Maybe there is something to this idea that, in a recession, Voice over IP service is an affordable alternative to traditional telephone service.
In the first half of 2009, VoIP services brought in nearly $21 billion in revenue, with both residential and business services looking healthy and poised for even more growth for the second half of the year, according to a report by market research firm Infonetics Research.
Residential voice services still brings in the majority of revenue, with the number of subscribers growing 14 percent from the end of 2008 through the first half of ‘09. On the business side, the research firm said it expected IP Centrex and hosted unified communications service revenue to grow 26 percent year-over-year.
But the current sweet spot, at least in North America, is small businesses with fewer than 100 employees.