VOIP and SIP News

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is now used on more than 22% of consumer broadband lines around the world.

According to industry analyst Point Topic, VoIP is claiming an ever greater market share and becoming increasingly important to Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

VoIP, which allows free or low-cost calls over the Internet, has already passed 100 million worldwide subscriptions

It continues to show impressive growth in 2010 by adding another 12 million subscribers. The industry accounts for 15 billion dollars a year, mostly in bundled VoIP subscriptions.

The senior analyst at Point Topic John Bosnell said: "In some markets subscribing to broadband without a bundled VoIP service is difficult and expensive.

"France Telecom, for example, offers only one stand-alone broadband subscription, with a low broadband speed. Consumers who want higher broadband speeds must choose a bundled offering with VoIP. "

Mr Bosnel explained that in France fierce competition has encouraged increasing numbers of bundled VoIP services to be offered.  Because consumers are expecting low-cost, add-on services from their ISPs, VoIP services are a cost-effectiven and easy to install solution.

Because of this more than 70% of households in France now have access to VoIP, while in America that is one in three broadband users, making it the best VoIP market.

However China does not show the same levels of saturation even though it has the largest worldwide broadband market. That can be explained by the fact that in China only one in 20 broadband subscriptions is now bundled with VoIP.

Therefore as more customers enjoy the cost-effective benefits of VoIP and more bundled subscriptions are available there is every chance that there could be 200 million subscribers worldwide by the year 2015.