Cable operators seem to have established a pretty healthy residential subscriber base for their VoIP
services. For instance, Comcast (News - Alert) announced today it has exceeded the two million customer mark for Comcast Digital Voice, the company's VoIP offering. Being on the road to successfully carrying out their marketing goals for the residential segment, cable operators are now showing signs of wanting to conquer other markets.
Indeed, according to a new study from ABI Research (News - Alert), cable operators have shown intent to aim at obtaining a slice of the business hosted VoIP
market. The research firm predicts that this particular market has a potential of exceeding $34 billion in 2012. According to ABI, cable operators are now after the North American portion of this market, which could amount to $11.6 billion.
The firm believes that all North American cable operators will be adamant in regards to their plans to conquer this market segment, including smaller regional providers.
“Cable companies have a lot of fiber capacity available in their urban and suburban networks,” commented Michael Arden, principal analyst for ABI, in a statement. “The cores of these networks are fairly free of bottlenecks, and operators have realized that they can target small businesses largely using existing resources, and at relatively little added expense.”
According to ABI, the providers will offer hosted VoIP packages featuring voice bundled with Internet access, storage and VPN
services.
“Offering VoIP and related services to small businesses is one way for the cable operators to undercut the telecom companies,” continued Arden. “To serve small businesses, they are devising solutions that scale down easily, unlike telcos which must offer solutions which scale so large that they're often inefficient and uneconomical at the small end.”
Want to learn more about VoIP? Then be sure to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.
Johanne Torres is contributing editor for TMCnet and Internet Telephony magazine. To see more articles by Johanne Torres, please visit her columnist page. Internet Protocol (IP) | X |
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