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Worldwide VoIP subscriber market
28/05/08
Worldwide
revenues from VoIP will reach £13.5bn in 2010 with the number of
subscribers topping 250 million.
That’s the
view of financial adviser Grant Thornton, who say that the total
VoIP customer subscriber base doubled in 2006 and has risen
four-fold in the past two years, so there’s every reason to believe
the number of VoIP subscribers worldwide could reach 250m in the
next two years.
One potential
result: a wave of acquisitions of independent VoIP software
developers, at least in some markets, as incumbents move in a bigger
way away from traditional voice.
VoIP is no
longer next generation telephony, it is here now and 2008 should see
strategic acquisitions of independent software developers and ISPs
by large telcos looking to consolidate their VoIP offerings, says
Sarika Patel, head of technology at Grant Thornton.
Potential
targets for acquisition in 2008 may include some of the many U.K.
independent residential and enterprise ISPs and resellers such as
Luminson and NDO, Prodigy Networks, Fast.co.uk, Firefly Internet and
Breathe Networks.
Whether an
acquisition wave makes sense in the U.S. market is open to question.
Simple access accounts will add little value for telcos building
fiber-based triple play networks or cable companies that compete
with telcos.
Arguably more
important are independent firms with skills in the commercial
markets. Cable companies could use such acquisitions as a
springboard into commercial markets.
But there
seems little reason to believe that mass market VoIP is complicated
or strategic enough to cause any major telco to "acquire" customer
bases or "key" skills.
AT&T and
Verizon, for example, already have begun marketing VoIP as the
"voice" component of their triple play strategies. But a
disconnected "over the top" VoIP customer adds little long-term
strategic or short-term revenue value.
We are drawing
closer to a tipping point for VoIP services as a basic part of an
incumbent offering, though. Up to this point, incumbents have
refrained from launching mass VoIP marketing efforts to preserve the
value of their legacy voice offerings. At some point, though,
incumbent service providers will reach a point where they lose more
money than they gain by refusing to embrace VoIP.
At that point
we will see massive marketing by incumbent telcos and a major push
to replace legacy voice services with VoIP. That's already happened
in Western Europe. But there are signs that U.S. service providers
finally see fibre-based access networks as the logical place to
begin introducing VoIP as a basic service.
Nick Gibson, editor
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