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Juniper Research (News - Alert) today released findings from its latest report, which predicts mobile VoIP use and growth trends over the next five years. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of both mobile and VoIP, the research firm predicts that there will be over one billion users of over the top (OTT) mobile VoIP services by 2017.

Obviously, there are a lot of considerations and advancements that must be made in terms of mobile infrastructure to support such a massive volume of high-bandwidth activity — especially considering that another Juniper Research report published earlier this year predicts that notebook computers and e-readers will contribute to mobile traffic demands significantly by 2016. Another report from the analyst firm, meanwhile, states that business mobile devices alone will reach 350 million devices by 2014.

Fortunately, the mobile VoIP report states that network technology will improve to meet this demand, spurred by increased competition and pressure on telecommunications providers to join the OTT space. These factors together will serve to make the mobile Internet voice market viable at high levels of demand.

However, many OTT service providers may have trouble monetizing, according to the report, as a very small percentage of users will pay to use the service, as is the case with Skype (News - Alert) on the desktop now.

“Many subscriber sign up to an OTT service without ever planning to pay a cent for it, and some industry players do not have a short-term revenue model at all,” stated the author of the report, Anthony Cox (News - Alert).

Still, leading mobile VoIP companies are becoming "increasingly sophisticated" in their service offerings, the report goes on to add, with many developing more or better ways to monetize their services.

Other key findings from the report include the fact that many specialist VoIP companies are opening their application programming interfaces (APIs) to third parties as an effort to gain revenue, while further 4G rollout will influence mobile VoIP adoption, perhaps to the detriment of overall voice revenue. All in all, this report spells out an interesting future for mobile voice.

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