VoIP Service Revenues To Zoom To $19.9 Billion By 2009: Report

Already a hot market in 2004, voice over IP (VoIP) service revenues are poised to soar to stratospheric levels over the next four years, according to a new study by Infonetics Research.

The report expects the VoIP services market, which exceeded $1.3 billion last year, to hit $19.9 billion in 2009 --- a 1,431% jump. Infonetics directing analyst Kevin Mitchell notes that part of this growth can be attributed to the technology's newness, reflecting a carrier migration to VoIP and the consequent introduction of new services. With VoIP services representing less than 1% of wireline carrier revenue in North America last year, the market can't really go anywhere but up.

"Growth is driven by carrier footprint and solution expansion, marketing, and service bundling, leading to more adoption by new business/government/education and residential/SOHO customers and increased usage at more sites," Mitchell said in a statement. "Our forecast also assumes that revenue growth is due to incremental revenue from add-on VoIP applications, such as conferencing, remote office integration, presence/location-based services, and collaboration."

Infonetics expects the number of residential and small office/home office VoIP subscribers to rocket from 1.1 million in last year to 20.8 million in 2008. The business and enterprise market, which grew 46% last year according to a related study released yesterday, remains dominated by managed IP private branch exchanges (PBXes). But Infonetics expects that to change as small and mid-sized businesses adopted hosted VoIP and predicts that business hosted VoIP service revenue will exceed that of managed IP PBX services by 2006.