Telcos Turn To VoIP To Beef Up Sagging Phone Revenues: Survey

Service providers, facing falling revenues from traditional phone services, are turning to VoIP to increase their revenues, according to a new report from Infonetics Research.

Eight-three percent of the North American, European, Asia Pacific, and Central and Latin American service providers in the study said that the need to generate new revenue is the primary reason they are migrating circuit-switched voice networks to packet networks. In particular, they hope the launch of new applications and services via VoIP will bring in additional revenue.

The study also found that:

* The top drivers for deploying VoIP are new applications and services, capex savings, and opex savings.

* The service providers' main barrier to using VoIP is potential problems with equipment interoperability* Service providers believe that incoming and outgoing VoIP traffic will nearly double over the next year, with international long distance traffic growing the fastest.

* SIP is becoming the leading protocol for communication between softswitch/voice application servers and media servers, and is expected to reach 100% penetration among respondents by 2007.