I am astonished. Never in my wildest dreams had I thought that VoIP service revenues have already hit the billion dollar mark. This I found out after coming across a new report conducted by research firm Infonetics Research. According to the firms findings, North American voice over IP service revenue topped $1.3 billion in 2004, and is expected to soar 1,431 percent to $19.9 billion in 2009. The firm based the forecast on research about VoIP services annual market size and forecast for North America.

"VoIP services are relatively new to the telecommunications scene, so the growth rates will be extremely high as communication networks and services trend towards VoIP," said Kevin Mitchell, directing analyst for Infonetics and author of the report. "As carriers migrate their network towards IP over the next 5 years, more services are inevitably next generation VoIP services. This is a very early look, as VoIP services revenue represents less than 1% of total wireline carrier revenue in North America in 2004."

"Growth is driven by carrier footprint and solution expansion, marketing, and service bundling, leading to more adoption by new business/government/education and residential/SOHO customers and increased usage at more sites," Mitchell added. "Our forecast also assumes that revenue growth is due to incremental revenue from add-on VoIP applications, such as conferencing, remote office integration, presence/location-based services, and collaboration."

Specifically, the study discusses the number of residential/SOHO VoIP subscribers in North America forecasted to climb from 1.1 million in 2004 to 20.8 million in 2008; why do managed IP PBX services, an earlier arrival than hosted offerings and aimed at medium and large organizations, make up just over half of the market in 2004; and how business hosted VoIP service revenue will exceed that of managed IP PBX services by 2006, as thousands of small and medium businesses adopt hosted offerings.

Infonetics Research
www.infonetics.com 

Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet.com and Internet Telephony magazine. Previously, she was assistant editor for EContent magazine in Connecticut. She can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]