Carrier VoIP equipment holds steady at $595mn

CALIFORNIA, USA: Worldwide service provider voice over IP equipment revenue totaled $595 million in 3Q09, a slight decline from the previous quarter. This is according to market research firm Infonetics Research's third quarter (3Q09) Service Provider VoIP Equipment and Subscribers and IMS Equipment and Subscribers market share and forecast reports.

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Diane Myers, directing analyst for service provider VoIP and IMS, Infonetics Research, said: “The service provider next gen voice equipment market continues to hold steady, with worldwide revenue in the third quarter roughly matching that of the second quarter. This stability is a very good sign for the industry, which has seen a tumultuous year. We are still expecting about a 30 percent drop in worldwide revenue for the overall 2009 year compared to 2008.,

“On the heels of an incredibly strong second quarter, IMS equipment sales were down in the third quarter, but the decline was a result of the market returning to normal levels after the unexpected spike. Despite the drop, it was a very solid quarter for IMS equipment, which is tracking right in line with subscriber growth and new deployments. We expect the worldwide IMS equipment market to more than double in 2009, and to grow to $1.6 billion by 2013,” Myers added.

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IMS Market Highlights:

Worldwide revenue for the core IMS (IP multimedia subsystem) equipment market, including HSS, CSCF, BGCF, and MRF equipment, declined 39 percent sequentially in 3Q09.

IMS equipment is experiencing strong and healthy growth, with near-term growth a reflection of continued adoption of VoIP services worldwide and service providers’ migration of VoIP services to IMS networks.

Key operators in Asia Pacific, such as NTT DoCoMo, Softbank, SK Telecom, and KT, continue to push on enhanced mobile services over their IMS networks, including mobile IM, video sharing, and PoC (push to talk over cellular).

While Ericsson has long led the IMS market in overall number of network deployments, it is coming under serious competition from Huawei, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Alcatel-Lucent.

In 3Q09, Huawei inched out Ericsson in worldwide CSCF revenue.

Service Provider VoIP Market Highlights

The global economic downturn is accelerating service provider migration to native IP, leaving behind TDM-related equipment and taking a toll on traditional trunk media gateways and softswitches.

Worldwide session border controller (SBC) revenue inched up half a percent from 2Q09 to 3Q09, to $38.7 million.

Class 4 softswitches rebounded with a 58 percent sequential increase in 3Q09, but it wasn’t enough to offset a 27 percent Class 5 softswitch decline.

For the second quarter in a row, trunk media gateways offered a bright spot in the market: worldwide revenue up 14 percent sequentially in 3Q09.

Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent posted strong double-digit percent increases in their media gateway revenue in 3Q09.

Nokia Siemens Networks posted 100 percent growth in softswitch sales in 3Q09.