The market for making phone calls over the Internet is set to more than double to US$40 billion within five years, researchers said.
Research firm Point Topic said on Wednesday global growth of fixed-line voice over internet protocol services grew 12.6 per cent in 2010 with global revenue at US$17.3 billion.
"The growth of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has been bumpy however shows signs of acceleration," said John Bosnell, Senior Analyst at Point Topic. "VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) has all the hallmarks of a classic substitution commodity." The US Federal Communications Commission said in March that consumer and business use of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) rose 21 per cent in the year to June 2010. Usage via traditional lines fell 8 per cent.
"We expect there to be over three quarters of a billion fixed line broadband subscribers by the end of 2015, in theory all of them are targets for VoIP," Bosnell said.
An increasing number of subscribers, for instance, have no fixed line telephone service at all, relying instead on mobile.
Skype, which was bought by Microsoft for US$8.5 billion last month, has around 150 million regular users, however Bosnell added that generated revenue was much lower.
"If Skype continues to grow as it has been and manages to keep its ARPU at the current level at that time it will be generating in the region of US$2 billion a year by the start of 2016," Bosnell said.
