Though VoIP penetration will continue to grow this year, growth of IP lines for the PBX (
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according to a new
report from a Redwood City, Calif.-based telecom market research firm.
Officials at
Dell’Oro Group say that this down economy is fueling vendor volatility, which in turn is causing some customers – business with analog or digital phone lines, for example – to stay where they are for now.
According to the firm’s director, Alan Weckel, VoIP penetration is growing at a slower pace in 2009 when compared to prior years – the result of market trends that go beyond a weakened economy.
“Also, as customers look to alleviate budget constraints, IP line growth will slow in the short term, putting additional downward pressure on the market,” Weckel said.
Here's how the firm envisions IP versus digital and analog lines, over time (click image to enlarge):
Dell’Oro’s report comes as researchers from another firm say the global VoIP services market grew 33 percent in 2008, to $30.8 billion.
As TMC (
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reports, Infonetics Research’s (
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“They’re being drawn to VoIP because of the cost savings and productivity enhancing features it brings,” Barnard reports. “The report defines VoIP services to include hosted VoIP (or IP Centrex), hosted UC (unified communications), integrated IP access, managed IP-PBXs, residential VoIP, SIP trunking and other types of IP voice access, including voice VPNs.”
Though business VoIP services represented only 31 percent of the total, this area grew faster than residential services during the year. Managed IP-PBX, hosted IP-PBX and hosted UC services accounted for three-fourths of the business VoIP total.
Interestingly, the report finds that SIP trunking is the fastest growing segment of VoIP services. Diane Myers, directing analyst for service provider VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research, predicts that SIP trunking will hit an 89 percent compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2013 – this trend driven mainly by cost. She said that hosted UC services will take off as well, with worldwide revenue doubling between 2009 and 2013.
That’s good news for companies such as Cisco (
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According to the report – though VoIP has been transforming the industry for more than a decade, the IP line shipments for the eight largest vendors in the market – that’s Aastra, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya (
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Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
