Thursday, December 20, 2012

Just How Saturated is the Voip Marketplace?

By Saul Saresi


Voip has quickly proven itself to be not just a viable option for business and residential communications, but also as an incredible leap forward into a future of communication where high quality audio and video transfer, substantially reduced call rates and incredible flexibility come as standard.

But because of the incredible advantages offered by Voice Over IP technologies, and the drastic uptake in people wanting to utilise Voip technologies, market saturation is a serious problem which service providers are taking very significant steps to research.

Time for some stats to back up the facts - beginning with Voice Over IP subscriber numbers. In 2010 the number rose by over 12% to reach one hundred and fifty seven million. As well as this, residential provider numbers grew by almost 15% in 2011 to just under one hundred and eighty million.

The most users belong to the USA, Japan and France respectively, with the UK languishing in 10th place - thanks in no small part to the somewhat lacking broadband ability.

In the case of France and Japan in particular, the main driver behind the rise in Voice Over IP coverage has been the introduction of fibre based broadband services. In France in particular nearly 95% of subscribers also have a Voice Over IP service.

But despite potential market saturation in France, there are still huge opportunities elsewhere, with China - the world's largest broadband market - only having one bundled Voice Over IP service for every 20 broadband subscriptions in 2010.

As well as this, mobile Voip usage is also growing at an incredible rate thanks to the ever increasing numbers of Smartphones on the market offering Voip services. In 2011 alone, active mobile Voip subscriber rates tripled to over 29 million from just 9 million in 2010.

And so there you have it. Some market sectors will, evidently, reach saturation point before others - but regardless of if and when that happens there will still be plenty left to go around. In the mean time, the only question that any business should be asking themselves is, do we have the best Voice Over IP service provider on the market? And if you've not yet considered that question, you need to step your game up.




About the Author:



No comments: