... Asia Pacific and central and Latin America believe new applications and services will encourage people to adopt VoIP products. Both incoming and outgoing VoIP traffic will almost double over 12 months, with long distance VoIP traffic being the fastest grower, service providers stated.

That new revenue potential is in turn driving service providers to look to VoIP as a means to claw back revenue lost from traditional phone services to the mobile operator world.

Additionally, the research showed that SIP is becoming the top protocol for communications between softswitch and voice application servers and media servers. SIP will reach 100% penetration throughout the networks of the service providers that responded to the survey by 2007.

Stephane Teral, principle analyst at Infonetics for service provider VoIP, IP multimedia subsystems and fixed mobile convergence, commented: “No longer is VoIP being offered only by specialist providers and VoIP pioneers, but by all types of providers in all regions of the world. Next generation voice services have elevated from lab curiosity to market reality. Still, this will not be an overnight process; replacing installed legacy gear in high teledensity areas like North America and Western Europe will take at least 10 to 15 years.”