Dell’Oro Group, the trusted source for market information about the networking and telecommunications industries, announced significant growth is being driven by Voice Over Long Term Evolution (VoLTE) projects. VoLTE-related spending over the past four quarters now exceeds $200 million on devices such as IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) Core devices and Telephony Application Servers. The $1.5 billion carrier voice market, on the other hand, is experiencing challenges as service providers evaluate this new infrastructure architecture and as the number of new voice subscribers slows.
“The most important trend underway in the telecom voice market is VoLTE. It is stimulating significant spending both in the wireless infrastructure, but also in the wireline infrastructure,” said Chris DePuy, Analyst at Dell’Oro Group. “In the third quarter 2012, we now have three operators commercially operating VoLTE services. The success of these services will very likely influence the continued adoption of VoLTE by other operators,” continued DePuy.
In addition, there has been a pause in spending on hot-selling devices such as Session Border Controllers and wireline Voice Application Servers, which together experienced a 3% annual decline. This deceleration is most directly related to low adoption rates of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) Trunking, an affordable business-class telephony service, in regions outside the United States. Bucking the declining trend are Alcatel-Lucent, Broadsoft, Metaswitch, and Sonus Networks.
