New VOIP Growth Forecast
While I'm always leary of industry forecasts, I like to use them to provide colour. Seaboard Research has stepped up to the table with a fresh set of forecasts for Canada's Internet telephony market. Seaboard expects there to be 2.1 million residential customers using VOIP by 2008, compared with a miniscule 32,800 in 2004.
The research firm believes cablecos will dominate the market with about 50% of the market three years from now. While I'm far from convinced about the actual numbers, cable dominnation seems obvious given the country's largest cablecos - Rogers, Shaw, Videotron and Cogeco - will have products in the market this year.
So what do the carriers do? They probably have little choice but to jump on the VOIP bandwagon if they want to compete on price and features. The more VOIP develops, the more you realize it's much more than just a cheap voice application. It's features such as Web-based voice-mail and point-and-click ways to forward calls and do mulit-person conferencing that will make circuit-switch technology pale in comparison.
January 27th, 2005 at 1:35 am
You seem to suggest that features such as Web-based voice-mail and point-and-click ways to forward calls are unique to VoIP. Both of them can be just as easily made available to circuit-switched telephone users who also have access to Internet. Verizon has introduced a service clled iobi that offers these features and more.
Aswath Rao