Telcos and CableCo Small Business Units Poised to Take a Revenue Hit

/PRNewswire/ -- Over the then and there five years, all of the major U.S. telcos and cable TV MSOs are expected to lose small business clients to a new crop of hosted service providers that will offer PBX (Private -Automatic- Branch Exchange)-like voice services at lower reoccurring costs and with minimal site equipment expense, according to a new market innovation study from The Insight Technology Corporation.

Insight Innovation's market analysis study, "VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) and the SME: CableCos, Telcos, and the Rise of Hosted Service Models, 2011-2016" points out that the advent of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) PBX business telephone innovation and the near universal availability of broadband services has enabled a variety of upstart hosted service providers just as 8x8, Aptela, Fonality, and Nextiva to target the small business market. These emerging companies are providing virtual PBX/VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services with enhanced features into the hotly contested lower end of the business segment—and they are doing it in ways that are more competitive in terms of functionality, productivity, and pricing than the service bundles being provided by either the telcos or the MSOs.

"There are more than forty million lines in the small business segment of the market now up for grabs, so we are not talking about chump change," says Robert Rosenberg, Insight Innovation president. "Our study suggests that in this way far, small businesses haven't quite latched on to this new innovation so the revenue today is only in the range of one-half billion dollars, nevertheless by 2015 hosted services be near a $1.2 billion market and the adoption rate of the hosted services by small businesses will continue increasing at a faster rate," Rosenberg concluded.

"VoIP and the SME: CableCos, Telcos, and the Rise of Hosted Service Models, 2011-2016" segments adoption by 20 vertical industries and provides revenue estimates for each. Potential small business line losses are estimated for telcos AT&T, CenturyLink, Cincinnati Bell, Fairpoint, Frontier, TDS, Verizon, and Windstream as so then as for MSOs Bright House, CableOne, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox, Mediacom, SuddenLink, Time Warner, and WOW Telecom.