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They must have had a pretty good New Year’s Eve party in Mobile VoIP Land, as there certainly was good reason to celebrate.

According to research from NPD In-Stat (News - Alert) cited by British international calling provider JustCall, the number of “active mobile Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) subscribers zoomed from 9 million at the end of 2010 to 29 million by the end of 2011.

Pop the Champagne corks all around -- hold the bottle at a 45 degree angle when opening to avoid having the wine overflow the bottle, said the former waiter -- and keep some on ice, since the study predicts 410 million users by 2015.

Most of the users of mobile VoIP live in Western Europe, the study found, and concluded that what drove such healthy growth was a combination of smartphone adoption coupled with the increasing availability of VoIP calling options available to mobile users.

It’s not difficult to understand the appeal, and it certainly wasn’t a difficult trend to predict. Almost exactly one year ago, in January 2011, TMC (News - Alert) noted that a previous In-Stat study found mobile VoIP usage on the rise, "creating significant opportunity for mobile VoIP gateway equipment suppliers as expenditures in this space are expected to soar beyond the $6 billion mark in 2015."

At that time, Amy Cravens, a market analyst for the research firm, attributed the mushrooming growth to the fact that mobile VoIP can extend enterprise desk phone functionality to mobile devices: “Business-oriented products will essentially enable the users’ cell phones to become an extension of their desk phones and will deliver, in addition to voice, a unified communications experience, including email, IM, and collaboration.”

Those promises have been fulfilled, which explains the boom in mobile VoIP adoption in the intervening twelve months. Compare those numbers with the fact that a couple years ago, research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan (News - Alert) released a report titled “Impact of Mobile VoIP on Next Generation Cellular Networks," finding that by the end of 2008, mobile VoIP revenues totaled $605.8 million, and predicted that mobile VoIP revenues in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Latin America would hit $29.57 billion worldwide by 2015.

At that time Saverio Romeo, Senior Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, cited “the emergence of flat rate mobile data pricing, positive growth of smartphone shipments, and high-speed mobile broadband availability” as what he saw to be the principal drivers of mobile VoIP growth.

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