Infontetics Research has released preliminary findings on VoIP sales in its Service Provider VoIP and IMS Equipment and Subscribers report, citing VoIP sales are up 52 percent from last year.
Q3 saw the VoIP equipment market holding pretty strong as the report claims that the economic downturn spurred service providers to migrate to IP communications. Some interesting things to note were Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent posting double-digit percent increases in their media gateway revenue for Q3 and Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens Networks posting 100 percent growth in softswitch sales for the same quarter.
“2013 is turning into a banner year for the IMS equipment market due largely to mobile operators in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea purchasing gear for voice over LTE (VoLTE),” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research (News - Alert).
The technology has changed the traditional method of functioning by replacing hardware switches to softswitch-based on software. This has reduced the cost of communication and enabled converged services at the same time.
Softswitches are software applications that are downloaded and installed on computers, so you can connect phone calls from one line to the other phone line by the help of Internet. Softswitches have higher scalability and are a great choice for companies that make a lot of calls to various locations.
Softswitches are the hub of VoIP networks, and they continue to evolve as carriers begin implementing IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (IMS) and next-generation network architectures.
Infonetics also notes that legacy equipment, in particular gateways and softswitches, showed resiliency rather than being a drag on results.
“The spending goes beyond core IMS to encompass session border controllers (SBCs), voice application servers and, in some cases, gateways, for access and interconnection capabilities,” Myers added.
It found the U.S. to have the biggest growth, despite declining results when comparing consecutive quarters.
Edited by Alisen Downey