Monday, October 25, 2010

Voice over Broadband gaining momentum

More than one in five consumer broadband lines now come with VoIP

Voice over IP is becoming increasingly important to service providers and achieving significant penetration of the consumer market according to the latest figures from leading industry analysts Point Topic.

“Over 22% of consumer broadband lines worldwide now come with a voice over IP service.  Passing 100 million subscriptions by the end of 2009 VoIP has continued to grow adding another 12 million subscribers in the first half of 2010,” said Point Topic’s Senior Analyst John Bosnell.

There are some markets now where it is very difficult and not generally cost effective to subscribe to broadband without a VoIP service thrown in. France Telecom for example offer one relatively low speed consumer stand-alone broadband subscription but a wide range of higher speed bundles.

“France is a stand out example. Fierce competition has been encouraged and ISPs like Free, who only offer bundled services which include VoIP, have helped drive consumer perception towards the expectation of low cost add on services from their ISPs and VoIP is relatively easy and cost effective solution,” said Bosnell.

This trend has meant that over 70% of French households now have a VOIP service available to them and saturation is now a significant factor. Other markets have more headroom.

“China, the largest broadband market, has only one in 20 broadband subscriptions with a VoIP bundle. The US which is currently the largest VoIP market in absolute terms is closing in on one in three mainly due to cable companies offering their customers a voice service based on VoIP. So there’s plenty of headroom there and around the world,” added Bosnell.

At the end of 2009 just under $15 billion a year was being generated by VoIP most often as part of a bundled subscription.  This is almost double the revenue generated by Security the next nearest value added service.

“VoIP has come a long way in a short time.  It’s attractive to consumers as it is priced very competitively in terms of subscription and call charges.  It’s attractive to operators as it’s a straightforward implementation that offers a chance for them to differentiate their services.  There’s no reason to believe growth is going to slow significantly until a market reaches saturation and we could reasonably expect to see 200 million subscribers by 2015,” concluded Bosnellb.

- compliments of my Broadband.

1 comment:

  1. The question is how does the local SA landscape look in comparison? We (Nashua Zululand) have recently partnered with a WISP, that will allow us to provide VOIP service over its network to all its customers, interconnecting offices and eventually providing a breakout service.

    Its a great step forward, for the local area however we still need significant traffic to get a ROI, if we are to offer a true breakout offering.

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