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Infonetics (News - Alert) Research yesterday released excerpts from its latest Mobile VoIP Services and Subscribers report, providing a thorough rundown of the native mobile voice over IP — better know as voice over Long Term Evolution, or VoLTE — and over-the-top (OTT) mVoIP service markets globally, including information on revenue, subscribers and deployments.

Key highlights from the report include the fact that the number of global OTT mobile VoIP subscribers has more than doubled from 2010 to 2011 to 98 million with EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) accounting for 40 percent of this.

Meanwhile, the report states that even though the first VoLTE services will be launching later this year, the number of global VoLTE subscribers should reach about 300,000 by next year. Major U.S. wireless carrier AT&T (News - Alert) will be a little late to the party, launching its VoLTE service in 2013.

"The U.S. and Asia, especially South Korea, are leading the voice over LTE charge, with Verizon Wireless, Metro PCS, SK Telecom and LG U+ all planning to launch VoLTE services this year," reports Stephane Teral (News - Alert), principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research, in a press release. "In fact, South Korea and Hong Kong have already successfully launched LTE (News - Alert) data roaming and by August, SK Telecom expects to have the Samsung Galaxy S3, the first handset to support VoLTE on their network."

In related news, another recent report from Infonetics Research — entitled "IMS Service Strategies, Product Features, and Vendor Leadership: Global Service Provider Survey" —states that VoLTE is, for the first time ever, the top driver for IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) deployments. Despite this, the majority of services running over IMS today are fixed-line VoIP.

Also this week, Infonetics Research released a study titled “Convergent Charging Software and Services – Bi-annual Worldwide and Regional Market Share, Size, and Forecasts” which names Comverse as the global convergent charging market share leader.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Oct. 2-5, in Austin, TX. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. For more information on registering for ITEXPO click here.

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