Enterprise Communications Featured Article

China’s VoIP telecom market is poised for growth, according to a Tadiran Telecom blog post.

“Cost savings, additional functionality and increased productivity—what's not to like about IP telephony?” Bill Miao wrote.

Apparently there’s plenty to love. China, along with the U.S., Japan, France, South Korea and Germany accounted for 80 percent of the revenue of VoIP technology worldwide in 2013.

Still, the growth of VoIP technology in China, as impressive as it is, has been hampered by restrictions on foreign ownership of businesses, a legacy of the country’s Communist government even as China moves further toward free markets and away from government ownership of industry.

The Chinese government has recently agreed to allow foreign companies to own telecom services, which offers a lot of potential for growth in the field of VoIP technologies.

China has almost 618 million Internet users, which represents a large potential market for VoIP services, both for consumers and in Enterprise. Services like Skype (News - Alert) have helped the Internet shrink the world even more as businesses and people with friends and family overseas can make calls for cheap and in many cases free over VoIP services. It’s no accident that IDC (News - Alert) expects Chinese telecom market is expected to grow to $191.9 billion this year.

Advanced telecom technology has seen wide adoption outside of the U.S. The third world in particular has rapidly adopted mobile telephony, even adopting smartphones and tablets and skipping traditional PCs. This follows the pattern of them adopting mobile technology after being passed over by landline telephony.

Around the world, VoIP seems to be doing for telephony what email did to paper mail, offer a faster, cheaper and more convenient alternative that many people will find irresistible. In China and all over the world, people will increasingly opt for VoIP services over traditional and inflexible phone systems.