Worldwide VoIP Subscribers More Than Double

The research firm states that many of the estimates on which their prediction is based are made using a conservative figure for growth of 10% Q4 2004 to Q1 2005. However, the total does not include those using PC-based systems, such as Skype and VoiceGlo.

According to Point Topic, Japan is by far the largest VoIP market, with 7.2 million subscribers, the majority of whom use Yahoo Softbank’s services, which come bundled with the company’s broadband products. However, customers do not entirely escape the cost of regular telephony, as they are required to retain their original line, and pay line rental, meaning the VoIP service is essentially a second line, offering cheap or no-cost calls.

America is the world’s second largest VoIP market, with around 2.1 million subscribers. However, this number looks set to rise substantially, as more cable providers include VoIP services in their packages.

Outside the cable market, US telecoms companies are beginning to launch VoIP services, with Verizon’s VoiceWing service up and running, while SBC begins to roll out its service, and Qwest develops plans for its own take on the technology.

The market for VoIP in Canada also looks promising, with all major Canadian cable companies having developed plans to implement the technology.

In Europe, several countries have shown steady growth, with France the largest European market as 1.2 million subscribers took advantage of the technology by the end of Q1 2005. Point Topic explains that the majority of these lines are operated by Free and Neuf, using a simple set top box to connect the user’s handset to the internet.

The overall number of VoIP users is thrown into some doubt, however, by the use of ‘soft-client’ services, such as Skype, which operate on PCs, some mobile phones and personal organisers, enabling users to connect to VoIP networks using their device’s existing internet capabilities.

The Skype software had been downloaded 100 million times by mid-April 2005. Of these, Point Topic reports that 35 million users had registered, with 1.2 million SkypeOut accounts, enabling connections to non-Skype phone numbers.

As Skype does not publish subscriber numbers it is extremely difficult to pinpoint its effect on the overall market for internet-based telephony. However, the company does provide a rolling ticker showing how many minutes it has served.

Point Topic states that, by monitoring these numbers it is possible to determine a weekly and daily average of minutes served. The research firm then divides this figure by a ‘rule of thumb’ number for the average usage per person, per day, to estimate Skype usage. Using this method for 2 weeks in June returned an average of 5.6 or 5.3 million ‘user-equivalents’ for the 2 weeks.

Taking its rule of thumb estimations, Point Topic reports that soft-client services represented 5.9 million VoIP users in Q1 2005, although these users contribute relatively little revenue to network providers.