Thursday, 6 December 2012

Is the Voip Marketplace Overly Saturated?

By Saul Saresi


No matter what business you're in, if you haven't at least considered the benefits that Voice Over IP could bring to your company, you haven't been paying very close attention to the future of business communication - a future that offers drastically improved call quality and lower call costs as standard.

But due to the incredible advantages offered by this system, there are sectors of the Voip world which face the very real prospect of market saturation being reached in the near future - and its a problem that service providers are seriously concerned about.

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.

The reason for the uptake is clear. In France, for example, since the introduction of fibre based broadband services, over ninety four percent of subscribers also have a Voice Over IP service, a fact which has lead the market sector to near saturation point.

But as with everything in life, when one door closes another one opens. And so even if France and Japan and even the USA get close to saturation point anytime soon, there is still, quite literally, a whole world of opportunity out there. In China alone in 2010 there was only one packaged Voice Over IP service for every twenty subscriptions.

And if further re-assurances were needed just take a quick look at the number of Smartphones endlessly making their way onto the market, all ready and waiting to be equipped with the latest Voip subscriptions. That is if the fact that the subscriber rates tripling in 2011 is anything to go by...

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.




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