Business IP Telephony Revenues Up 13 Percent for 2010

“The market for business Voice over IP services slowed during the financial turmoil of 2009, but we are now seeing a good uptick in new business across all segments, particularly in IP connectivity services," said Diane Myers, directing analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research.

Worldwide VoIP service revenue totaled $22.6 billion in the first half of 2010, up eight percent over the second half of 2009, driven by solid growth in business and residential services across all regions, she noted.

A growing number of hosted providers are incorporating unified communication elements and mobility into their standard offerings, which is creating new levels of service differentiation as well.

The number of residential VoIP subscribers grew 10 percent between the second half of 2009 and the first half of 2010. Some other estimates peg U.S. VoIP revenue (consumer and business) at about $14 billion.

To put those numbers in perspective, though, consider that in 2007 and 2008, the last years for which we have comprehensive data, U.S. communications revenues were in the range of $297 to $299 billion. Put another way, consumer VoIP revenue represents possibly two percent of total industry revenues.

Though residential VoIP services revenue growth is slowing due to pricing pressures across all geographies, new developments continue in regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia that previously did not have a large residential VoIP provider base, Infonetics Research said.

The first half of 2010

In the first half of 2010, the IP connectivity segment of the business VoIP services market surged past the managed IP-PBX (News - Alert) and hosted VoIP and unified communications services segments to become the largest segment of the market. In other words, SIP trunking now is the single largest portion of the IP telephony service revenue stream.

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