Communications and Technology Industry Research

Market research company iLocus on Wednesday published its eighth annual VoIP industry report, revealing overall industry performance and market leaders in more than 50 services and equipment sectors.

 

The report focuses on VoIP market leaders, vendor shipment levels, and voice over broadband (VoBB) subscriber growth worldwide.

 

 

iLocus reported that the VoIP equipment market—which includes softswitches and media gateways—generated revenues of $2.2 billion during 2006, a growth rate of about 24 percent over 2005. Last year, sales in the market included 36.9 million Class 5 softswitch licenses, 34.8 million Class 4 softswitch licenses, and 48.2 million service provider media gateway ports.

 

Which companies were selling all those licenses and ports? iLocus reports market leaders as follows: 

 

According to iLocus’ report, more than 8.5 million desktop IP phones (38 percent increase over 2005), and 18.3 million IP-PBX licenses (52 percent increase over 2005) were shipped globally during 2006.

 

In the enterprise VoIP market segment, 204,000 voice-over-WiFi handsets and roughly 2.9 million VoIP ATA ports, were shipped.

 

Once again, iLocus reported on the companies dominating this growth, as listed below. 

 

Here’s an astounding number to contemplate: iLocus claims that, during 2006, 1,079 billion VoIP minutes were clocked.

Who was using all those minutes? At the end of 2006, there were an estimated 37.5 million VoBB subscribers worldwide, 16.5 million of them having been added during the year.

 

Those minutes can be broken down into local call volume (382.3 billion), long distance call volume (614.4 billion) and international long distance (82.6 billion), revealing that VoIP was most popular for country-specific long distance calling.

 

Countries where VoBB subscriber growth was especially strong included the U.S. (3 million new subscribers), France (2.15 million new subscribers) and Germany (1.16 million new subscribers). Meanwhile, providers in the Netherlands, Canada and Italy spent 2006 aggressively working to expand their subscriber bases.

 

Vendors leading the VoIP platforms market during 2006 included Sonus Networks, UTStarcom (News - Alert), Cisco, and Comverse.

 

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Mae Kowalke previously wrote for Cleveland Magazine in Ohio and The Burlington Free Press in Vermont. To see more of her articles, please visit Mae Kowalke’s columnist page. Also check out her Wireless Mobility blog.