Infonetics is an international market research and consulting firm that helps businesses plan, strategize, and compete in the communications market. Last month, Infonetics’ Biannual VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers report documented exceptional growth in SIP trunking, and last week, its North American Business VoIP Service Leadership Scorecard outlined the current state of the VoIP industry.
Why might we be interested? SIP trunking is a feature in every OnSIP Hosted PBX account. OnSIP Trunking leverages the reliability and infrastructure of the OnSIP platform for optimum performance. Unlike other SIP trunking service providers, OnSIP do not charge you per channel or trunk. You simply open an OnSIP account, with a minimum fee of $49.95 per month, and then pay as you go for usage.
Back to the report: According to Infonetics, SIP trunks rose 83% in 2012 from the prior year, as multi-site businesses adopted SIP trunking for cost savings and flexibility. This cements SIP trunking as the fastest growing segment of business VoIP. With the advent of SIP trunking, IP connectivity is becoming a commodity market with increased price competition. Providers need financial stability, extremely automated processes, and large geographic reach to gain users.
According to the reports, the global VoIP market totaled $63 billion in 2012, up 9% from 2011. Hosted VoIP and UC services increased in revenue by 17%, the most of any segment. This boost represents continued demand for enterprise cloud-based services. Infonetics expects the business and residential VoIP services market to grow to $82.7 billion in 2017.
The largest VoIP services segment continues to be Managed IP PBX services, which concentrate on dedicated enterprise systems. Sales in this segment grew 9% in 2012. The world’s largest residential VoIP service provider in 2012 was NTT. Their user base represented 7.6% of all global subscribers. The next largest providers were Comcast and France Télécom.
At the end of 2012, each of the top hosted VoIP providers had over 200,000 seats. The cutoff for the top 10 was slightly below 100,000 seat counts. Businesses have a large number of providers to choose from, including traditional operators, cable MSOs, VARs/agents, PBX/UC vendors, and pure play hosted providers.
Infonetics continues to be one of the leading market research firms in communications, and its future studies will be instrumental in predicting the future of the VoIP industry.