A new market research report titled, “The Future of Consumer VoIP: Leveraging Internet advances for profitable consumer voice services,” is now available.

"It is important to distinguish between a profitable business that successfully sells VoIP services and a profitable VoIP business,” said the report’s authors, adding that successful VoIP businesses “are driven by other services the company offers, and by services that align with customers' perceived needs, not by the VoIP business alone."

In the early 2000s, you might recall overheated telecom industry experts confidently assuring you that VoIP would change the dynamics of the voice communications business. But as the report’s authors noted, a decade later “the largest providers of consumer Internet voice services are, with one exception, conventional telecommunications companies.”

In point of fact some are pioneers and innovators, but others – dare we say most? – are not. What they do share, however, is a market strategy that doesn't rely solely on price.

And the pressure is on VoIP service providers to make VoIP mobile, the report’s authors conclude, “Driven by growing mobile handset capabilities and broadband subscriptions, and continued high prices for international calls, the market for mobile VoIP is developing quickly.”

This report finds that the most profitable over-the-top VoIP providers are those that quickly used their success to build their own networks. Successful VoIP providers offer multiple communications services, as well as services aligned with the key needs of targeted markets.

“Consumer VoIP is most successful in the most regulated (non-Communist) markets,” the report’s authors said, adding that the core network “is still a key opportunity for service providers to differentiate.”

Another thing the report finds is that telecoms have more natural advantages in the VoIP business than incumbency, since “they understand consumer expectations, and the migration to all-IP networks allows them to leverage network consolidation.”