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Fear Factor Drives Telcos to Offer
VOIP Services, New Survey Finds
Carriers cite the threat of lost revenues as the No. 1 reason
to offer VOIP services to businesses and consumers, Heavy Reading
reports
NEW YORK, Sept. 20, 2005 /LongDistanceWorld.com/ -- The world's
largest telecom carriers are accelerating their plans to offer
Internet-based VOIP services to
their customers in large part because they are afraid of losing
critical business to competitors, according to a major new report
issued today by Heavy Reading, Light Reading Inc.'s market
research division.
The Future of VOIP: A Heavy Reading Service Provider Survey
presents and analyzes results from an exclusive, worldwide survey
of network operators regarding their current and planned
deployments of VOIP technologies and services, as well as their
attitudes toward
VOIP's benefits and drawbacks. The survey was
conducted by Heavy Reading in August 2005, providing an
up-to-the-minute assessment of
carrier VOIP plans.
The survey includes responses from more than 175 carrier
professionals representing more than 130 network operators
worldwide, including AT&T (NYSE: T), BellSouth (NYSE: BLS), BT
Group (NYSE: BT; London: BTA), SBC Communications (NYSE: SBC), and
Verizon Communications (NYSE: VZ).
"The single biggest reason for deploying VOIP is fear that traffic
would otherwise migrate to competitors' networks," notes Graham
Finnie, Heavy Reading Senior Analyst and author of the report.
"Not surprisingly, this view is especially true among incumbent
telcos -- over three-quarters of incumbent respondents saw fear of
traffic loss as important or critically important to their VOIP
strategy."
Other key findings from The Future of VOIP: A Heavy Reading
Service Provider Survey include the following:
Over the next two years, carriers expect a big surge in the
proportion of voice traffic that is VOIP. Half the respondents
said more than 50 percent of their voice traffic would be IP by
2007, with relatively little difference expected between VOIP in
core networks and in access networks.
More than three-quarters of survey respondents said their company
had already deployed VOIP in some part of its network, and within
12 months that figure will rise to almost 90 percent. At the same
time, over half of respondents said that less than 10 percent of
traffic, in both access and core, was VOIP today -- and the
proportion of customers with VOIP-enabled terminals or handsets
was even lower.
Most network operators with softswitches deployed in their network
have opted for integrated devices, although the data suggests
there will be a slight trend toward distributed softswitches in
the next two years. Access media gateways are the most widely
deployed VOIP network equipment today, and 84 percent of
respondents expect to be using them within two years. However, the
highest growth in uptake of VOIP equipment is expected to be in
media servers and session border controllers (SBCs) or other
policy control equipment.
The Future of VOIP: A Heavy Reading Service Provider Survey is
published in PDF format and costs $2,950. The price includes an
enterprise license covering all of the employees at the
purchaser's company. Purchasers of the report also gain access to
the full survey results, for targeted analysis in a searchable
database. The online database allows for segmentation of results
by a range of factors, including service provider type, geographic
location, and respondent job title.
About Heavy Reading
Heavy Reading is an independent market research organization
offering quantitative analysis of telecom technology to service
providers, vendors, and investors. Its mandate is to provide the
comprehensive competitive analysis needed today for the deployment
of profitable networks based on next-generation hardware and
software.
Source: Heavy Reading |
