VoBB subscriber base gallops to 29m

BANGALORE: A quarterly report published by iLocus, a market research firm dedicated to VoIP industry, reveals that there were estimated 29 million Voice over Broadband (VoBB) subscribers worldwide as of end June 2006, thus adding about 5 million new subscribers worldwide.

The 'VoIP Minutes and Subscribers: 2Q06 Update'  estimates that US had 6.8 million subscribers, France 4.2milion, Germany 1.8 million, Netherlands 1.6 million and Italy had 1.5m subscribers. However Japan still leads the market worldwide.

The report also reveals that estimated 254.2 billion minutes of VoIP traffic was carried by service providers worldwide in the second quarter of 2006 (2Q06). Of these minutes, 87.4 billion was local call volume, 146.9 billion was national long distance (NLD) call volume, and 19.9 billion was the international long distance (ILD) call volume.

According to the report, Sonus, UTStarcom, Cisco and Netcentrex emerged as leading vendor platforms in various different categories.

The report covers the period from April 2006 to June 2006 (2Q06), reporting on VoBB subscribers in 25 countries, and VoIP minutes in local, NLD, and ILD segments worldwide