September 24, 2008
Report: European VoIP Revenues Will Hit Top �3.9 Billion This YearBy Gary Kim, Contributing Editor After a slow initial start, European consumers have adopted IP-based voice service at a blistering pace, say researchers at TeleGeography Research (News - Alert). At year-end 2007, 25.3 million consumer voice-over-IP (VoIP) lines were in service in Europe, up from 15 million in 2006.
At the end of 2004, only 1.9 million VoIP lines were in service, equivalent to just over one percent of European households. By the end of 2007, VoIP subscribers had grown to 25.3 million lines, accounting for 17 percent of households.
All those lines are of the “replacement for legacy voice lines” sort, and do not count client-based VoIP applications such as Skype (News - Alert).
The VoIP subscriber growth rate has slowed in recent quarters, but net subscriber growth remains very high, TeleGeography says. The number of quarterly subscriber additions grew from approximately one million subscribers per quarter throughout most of 2005 to two million subscribers in much of 2006, and averaged 2.6 million subscribers per quarter in 2007.
Revenues from VoIP services have grown at a comparable pace. Annual revenues from consumer VoIP services were €640 million in 2005, €1.6 billion in 2006, and €2.9 billion in 2007, TeleGeography says.
Given current growth patterns, VoIP revenues should top €3.9 billion in 2008, TeleGeography predicts.
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Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Gary's articles, please visit his columnist page. Edited by Mae Kowalke |