06 May 2009

VoIP to continue boom in 2009

VoIP and converged communications grew by a third last year and have continued to grow so far this year.

A report from Infonetics Research found the market rose to $30.8 billion (£20.4 billion) in 2008, with business VoIP booming more than residential take up, despite the latter increasing to 106 million customers.

Figures for the three months so far this year show an average of 40 to 50 per cent year-on-year growth has occurred.

Diane Myers, directing analyst of service provider VoIP and IMS at Infonetics Research, said: "We expect hosted UC [unified communications] services to take off, with worldwide revenue doubling between 2009 and 2013 and we forecast SIP [session initiation protocol] trunking service revenue to hit an 89 per cent compound annual growth rate from 2008 to 2013."

It follows predictions from Gartner earlier this week that mobile VoIP will outgrow conventional platform-based services in the next few years.