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Telephony has made some substantial inroads over the last several years, but a recent study released from the Dell (News - Alert)'Oro Group shows just how far this sector has gained. Some gains were comparatively slim, but other gains were downright staggering in scope, showing that even though this market is largely on the rise, some parts of it are significantly more on the rise than others.

The overall market for carrier Internet protocol (IP) telephony grew fully three percent over the same time last year. Within that market, several segments saw significant advance, bringing the IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) core, voice application server and session border controller (SBC) market to within striking distance of the $1 billion per quarter mark, reportedly about $50 million away. What's more, the total carrier IP telephony market represented about $1.7 billion in the third quarter of 2014, covering a host of areas ranging from voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) to voice over LTE (VoLTE) service.

Dell'Oro Group vice president of carrier IP telephony research Chris DePuy, meanwhile, offered up further comment on the issue, noting that operators were expanding service offerings to specifically take advantage of shared infrastructure, meaning that interoperability benefits were becoming a larger part of the picture than ever. Meanwhile, DePuy also noted that several other sections of the market were making gains from voice over Wi-Fi to rich communications services (RCS) that were all bringing in new features, and thus driving greater reasons for users to connect using these services. We have video of this and a variety of other subjects available at this link.

The study in turn brings plenty of key points to note. It's interesting to note that the total carrier IP telephony market is about $1.7 billion, but the combination of IMS core, voice applications server and SBC brought in roughly half of that entire market alone. It's not hard to see a market's figures on the rise given that there are more components of the market emerging, and in turn, more contributors to the bottom line. When there are more contributors to the bottom line, the bottom line is thereby able to better weather changes in the field, as where one part may falter, another part may not, and thus the overall impact is lessened. Looking at the market as a whole, with more and more users turning to IP communications methods, it's easy to see how this market could take off. Consider the mobile workers looking for a way to communicate from the field, the stationary office users looking for a way to easily speak to a business on the other side of the country or even the planet, the regular home users looking for a way to trim a long distance bill and so on, and it becomes clear why this market looks to be in a growth pattern.

Naturally, this is still fairly early-stage stuff, and quite a bit of this market could easily change course in the coming months. But based on what's been seen so far, this is a development that may have legs in the long term, and may well carry on into the future as more and more demand is placed on the network to serve as a voice system as well as a data transfer system.