While Huawei is widely known for its lineup of mobile devices--though not as big as its competitors in the field like Samsung and Apple (News - Alert)--there's a lot more to Huawei than just mobile phones. One of the biggest new sectors for growth for Huawei is in the VoIP switch market, where it has made some major moves in recent months.

Huawei's (News - Alert) biggest business, reportedly, is its network equipment sales arms. The sales within this division to telephone operators measured $25 billion strong in 2012, helping to keep nearly 80,000 workers employed by the company. It has also seen astonishing growth numbers, going from 2,000 total workers to 150,000 worldwide 17 years later. That's a big business, and one of the biggest sectors within that growth are mobile softswitchs.

A mobile softswitch also known as a VoIP switch, works in a phone network to send calls to their intended destinations. Using mobile softswitches allows networks to expand coverage on-the-fly, letting them add capacity as they add customers, which is pretty much the ideal way for any business to expand. Since the price of switches is connected to the size of an operation and licenses are sold to every customer that uses a switch, it provided an extra opportunity for Huawei, who offered up its licenses on a perpetual basis. This was markedly different from other approaches, and provided the added advantage of removing the recurring costs that businesses were constantly faced with when Huawei started offering up its perpetual licenses.

This led to an absolutely huge response; at last report, Huawei says that three billion consumers worldwide have had their calls routed through a Huawei switch at some point, representing one of Huawei's most successful products.

Despite the fact that Huawei is one of the biggest players in the market, it certainly isn't alone. Sippy Software also offers a softswitch solution, geared toward VoIP carriers that offers a similar level of scalable service in call routing for those carriers. The Sippy softswitch, meanwhile, can operate up to 7,000 calls at a time, with a monthly license rental offered. This offers the added benefit of allowing companies to know just how much that will need to be paid out each month to maintain licenses. Sippy Software's softswitch solution is actually proving to be a solid choice for many companies, currently accounting for four billion minutes of traffic that is spread out over thousands of different networks and in over 100 countries around the world. That's a lot of networking muscle, and it all suggests that Sippy Software's softswitch solution is a sound one at that.

There's a lot to be said for Huawei's solution though. Three billion customers handling it is quite an endorsement, and that permanent license has to be pretty compelling in its own right. But Huawei isn't alone in the market, and with firms like Sippy Software making a play for their own slice of the market, Huawei will have its work cut out for it in retaining its impressive market share. By the same token, there will be plenty of alternatives for those mobile providers looking to get their hands on softswitch technology to power their networks, and that gives them plenty of opportunities to find the best releases they can.