VoIP is still alive and raking in big revenue
Who said VoIP is dead, According to Infonetics , demand for residential and business VoIP services continues to grow. In the first half of 2009, the VoIP services market grew to $20.7 billion. This shows there is strong demand for VoIP services and Voice is still the undisputed cash cow for operators. The future looks promising for hosted UC. This should be good news to Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya and Skype. I don’t know of any service (excluding cable TV) today that can guarantee monthly revenue as voice and SMS.
Some of the highlights of the report:
• IP connectivity services currently make up about a third of total VoIP business service revenue, growing to 40% of the total by 2013 (managed IP PBX services and hosted VoIP and UC services make up the balance)
• The current sweet spot of the North American IP Centrex market is small business (those with fewer than 100 employees)
• Roughly two-thirds of all IP Centrex seats sold in the first half of 2009 went to small businesses
• While the largest VoIP services opportunities are in North America and EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), demand for VoIP services is growing fast in Asia Pacific and Central and Latin America
• The number of residential/SOHO VoIP subscribers is forecast to top 225 million by 2013
Most of the VoIP Services should have been free since it uses the existing internet infrastructure to route the calls except for PSTN termination. It’s because of VoIP that we are seeing such a low price for international calling. Some of the operators like Vonage support unlimited international calling, which was a dream for some folks a decade back. As long as VoIP is alive, consumers can enjoy cheap and affordable national/international voice calling.