Growth in VoIP Services Market a Sign of Increased Confidence in VoIP Technology

Telecom market research firm Infonetics Research has released excerpts from new reports on the growth of the VoIP industry. In August, it found that the global VoIP and IMS equipment market grew 30% (in 2Q13) to $936 million. And just two weeks ago, the firm released a report showing that VoIP services market revenue grew 3%, on track with predictions for 2013.

An interesting finding is that although residential VoIP accounts for most of the market’s revenue, the growth in revenue is mostly due to business. Another noteworthy fact is that within this growth, large enterprise (as opposed to small and mid-sized business) makes up the biggest portion.

Back in June, we explained in our Telonium Thursdays series why hosted VoIP was generally a better alternative for small to mid sized businesses. For larger business, however, we said that the advantages of VoIP as compared to analog were not so certain. Large companies would likely already have an IT staff and would need high-end internet service in order to use VoIP.

Clearly though, now even enterprise-level businesses are beginning to find VoIP as a reliable solution. One of the reasons is that there has been a constant expansion of high-speed internet service – for example, the growth of fiber – in the last few years.

This trend in the VoIP market is also consistent with established business becoming comfortable and trusting in hosted VoIP phone systems. Old beliefs that “VoIP voice quality is poor” or “hosted VoIP is unreliable” are fast going away. If even established businesses are finding it trustworthy, mid-sized and small businesses should have less hesitation as well. Perhaps startup businesses with an innovative and experimental attitude will instead consider VoIP sullied by how “mainstream” the technology is becoming and dismiss it as “too safe” (just kidding!).

As an additional finding, Infonetics Research has predicted continued growth, expecting the VoIP services market to be $80 billion by 2017. What we know now is that this trend exists for both residents and businesses as a whole, and this means that distrust in Voice over IP will become less of a concern in the coming years.

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