If it seems like you’ve been hearing more and more about the growth and advantages of VoIP these days, there’s a reason for that; the market is exploding.
According to a new report from Future Market Insights, “The global VoIP services market is driven by industry participants focusing intensely on pushing VoIP solutions across corporate and individual consumer sectors. This has led to multi-pronged developments, especially in network infrastructure and cloud-based models.”
If FMI’s numbers are to be believed, this is an expanding market with no end in sight. The research suggests that the growth of the global VOIP services market is being driven by technological advancements, which in turn lead to a rollout of advanced networks and increased usage of these service over various other networks.
For example, the study shows that in 2012, the corporate consumer segment accounted for $43.27 billion of the global VoIP services market in terms of revenue. But the forecast is that that number will spike to around $86.20 billion by 2020.
Other segments are expected to rise as well:
The computer-to-computer segment of the VoIP services market registered revenue at $20.74 billion with 57.4 million subscribers in 2012. By 2019 however, this segment is expected to account for $24.74 billion with 72.2 million subscribers.
The phone-to-phone segment of VoIP was worth nearly $16 billion in 2012, and is projected to hit nearly $45 billion by 2019.
The individual consumer VoIP market was at $20.7 billion just three years ago, and is expected to grow so quickly that researchers are hesitant to put a number on it.
According to the research, this growth is attributed largely to service providers transitioning from circuit-switched networks to packet-switched networks. Hence the market has been witnessing a shift from traditional telephony using CDMA or GSM technology, to VoIP services using cellular networks such as 3G and 4G.