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| VoIP has established itself in the mainstream of telecoms, accounting for an ever larger share of voice minutes in all market segments, and having an ever more significant impact on the mobile market as smartphone penetration increases.
The clear mass market leader is Skype, which continues to go from strength to strength and is now the largest carrier of global international calling minutes, as well as having over half a billion registered users. As a 'category killer,' Skype has led to the withdrawal of a number of VoIP service providers, most notably Tesco, the global retailer, which decided it was unable to develop the critical mass to compete.
VoIP is well established amongst business customers of all sizes as it offers the potential for them to cut costs, improve productivity and enhance customer service through its value-added features and portability. In many ways, VoIP has been the harbinger of convergence between voice and data/IP networks, facilitating a growing range of unified communication and collaboration services. VoIP's adoption amongst both consumer and business customers continues to be driven by the increasing penetration of broadband services and by the recent growth of Ethernet services in the corporate market. The growing availability of fibre-based broadband and faster mobile technologies will also serve to drive further adoption, but VoIP as a set of distinct products will increasingly be replaced by voice and value-added voice applications as 'just another app' (albeit a very important one). The importance of voice as an 'app' means that customers will still remain concerned about issues such as security, reliability and call quality. Also, security is a growing concern amongst governments worried about their inability to track communications by potential terrorists, given the nature of IP communications, so imaginative and practical solutions will need to be developed to assuage these concerns. It is still unclear what the eventual impact of industry giants such as Google will be, or how the rise in social networking will impact the market - they will probably both expand and accelerate the VoIP market over time, but are unlikely fundamentally to change its course. All told, the product term 'VoIP' is now probably only really relevant for those service providers that exploit the technology in its original proposition - as a means of getting cheaper calls than by traditional telephony services. The fact that over 86% of French broadband subscriptions are sold with voice over broadband services underlines that technology only matters as an enabler of communication. The fact that VoIP can be integrated with other technologies for convenience (e.g. 'call me' capabilities on Web sites, e-mails or social networking sites), or to offer value-added functionality (e.g. conferencing calls, call recording, integration with address books) means that, although the term may have less and less prominence, the technology will continue to play an ever greater role in everyone's private and working lives. |
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VOIP Reports
- Analysis of the Central American and Caribbean Unified Communications and Collaboration Solutions Market
- Analysis of the Andean Region Unified Communications and Collaboration Solutions Market
- Analysis of the Southern Cone Unified Communications and Collaboration Solutions Market
- Unified Communications and Collaboration Professional Services: A Customer's Perspective
- Buyer Conversations: Integrating Unified Communications and Analytics into the Contact Centres Can Double Conversion Rates and Improve Process Automation
