Carriers look to VoIP to generate new revenue

Infonetics: Threatened by falling income from traditional phone service, more and more service providers are looking to voice over IP to help them beef up revenue generation

83% of the North American, European, Asia Pacific, and Central and Latin American service providers interviewed by Infonetics rated the availability of new applications and services the highest among drivers for adopting VoIP products, confirming that new revenue is the main reason they are migrating circuit-switched voice networks to packet networks.

No longer is VoIP being offered only by specialist providers and VoIP pioneers, but by all types of providers in all regions of the worled, provider VoIP, IMS, and FMC. Next gen voice services have elevated from lab curiosity to market reality. Still, this will not be an overnight process; replacing installed legacy gear in high teledensity areas like North America and Western Europe will take at least 10 to 15 years. In these areas, many carriers are letting their legacy equipment slowly churn while using VoIP now as an augmentation or an alternative, or when more capacity or expansion to a new location is needed. Meanwhile, new entrants to the VoIP market and incumbents in regions like Eastern Europe and South East Asia that are bringing teledensity up to average levels are deploying next gen voice as their primary platform.

• Top 3 drivers cited by service providers for deploying VoIP: new applications and services, capex savings, and opex savings

• #1 barrier: equipment interoperability

• Service providers expect both incoming and outgoing VoIP traffic to nearly double over the next year, with international long distance traffic growing the fastest

• SIP is becoming the leading protocol for communication between softswitch/voice application servers and media servers, reaching 100% penetration among respondents by 2007

• Top rated benefit to deploying IMS-compliant equipment: ease of new service creation

• Top rated barriers to deploying IMS-compliant equipment: the complexity of multimedia services and the lack of consensus on the definition of IMS architecture

• Top strategies for offering fixed mobile converged (FMC) services: using SIP signaling to dual-mode handsets, integrating wireline and mobile services, and using IP core to transport voice between mobile switching centers

Service Provider Plans for Next Gen Voice & IMS Publ 20060731