It’s Diane Myers’ job to stay on top of the trends in VoIP, although from her obvious passion and extraordinary insight, I’m pretty sure she would do it anyway. Today, in the Acme Packet (News - Alert) University event on Harvard’s campus in Cambridge, Mass., she revealed some important statistics and trends on the development of VoIP concerning IP multimedia subsystems (IMS) and session border controller (SBC) deployment.

She noted that one of the main questions she has been getting is, “Why are service providers even looking at VoIP?” Well, for several reasons, many of them including important drivers such as new service opportunities and cost savings.

There are savings in VoIP, no doubt, and service providers are doing Class 4/5 replacements in order to save money and explore new opportunities, noted Myers, but VoIP service revenue continues to grow.

There has been strong growth across all regions yet Myers’ statistics pointed to the fact that residential subscribers will remain the bulk of the installed base. According to Myers’ data, VoLTE doesn’t start to have meaningful global presence until 2015, which considering the edge it’s starting to take, makes sense.

She talked about the relative “simplicity” of the softswitch-based architecture as opposed to the IMS architecture. “There are still a lot of networks that operate on this fixed line structure,” she said, but there is a broad set of vendors of softswitches, trunk media gateways, voice application servers, and media servers.

The IMS vendor landscape is currently dominated by TEMs, as Myer demonstrated. Mostly, the scene is split into two groups: large TEMS including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens Networks, with a focus on the end-to-end result. The specialized vendors such as Acme Packet, Samsung, and Broadsoft focus on best-in-class, traditionally.

In terms of service provider session border controllers being deployed for access and interconnection, Myers revealed results from an Infonetics (News - Alert) survey. The firm asked, “What services are you running through your SBCs?” The top answer was SIP and SIP trunking services.

Overall, VoIP is trending towards the integration of VoLTE services and the rolling out of SBCs – those two deployments actually going hand-in-hand.

Stay tuned for more news from the Acme Packet University event today!