New Study: 2015 Biggest Year Yet for Carrier IMS, VoIP

The carrier IMS and VoIP space experienced the best performance to date last year, according to IHS. Revenue in these categories in 2015 was estimated at $5.5 billion, a 31 percent increase over the previous year, the consulting and analyst firm indicates.

Launches of voice over LTE in Africa, the Asia Pacific, Europe, and Middle Eastern countries helped drive this strong outcome, explained Diane Myers, the company’s senior research director for VoIP, UC, and IMS. China and India specifically were big contributors to this trend, she added.

Forty-eight communications services providers turned up commercial VoLTE services as of January of this year, and there’s more to come. This year, 23 CSPs in the Asia Pacific, 20 in EMEA countries, and five carriers in North America are expected to do the same.

Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, ZTE, and BroadSoft were the network infrastructure providers in the carrier IMS and VoIP arena that benefitted most last year from the adoption of these solutions, which rung up $1.4 billion in business for the market at large in the fourth quarter of 2015. Hot products in this realm included IMS core elements, session border controllers, and voice application servers, which IHS reported all posted solid year-over-year growth.

While IHS didn’t mention Diameter in promoting its new study, the adoption of LTE also seems to have sparked new interest in this technology. In IMS architecture, Diameter works with SIP, authenticating the subscriber and authorizing what applications and services that subscriber can access. Diameter also logs the transaction for billing purposes.

Circling back to India’s investment in carrier IMS and VoIP, and Ericsson’s success in this space, just recently Idea Cellular tapped Ericsson to help with its LTE deployment. India’s third largest mobile services operator, which has more than 170 million subscribers, will leverage Ericsson solutions to reach 40 million of its customers with 4G services.