Infonetics VoIP Study Says Competition, IMS and CAPEX Remain Key Drivers

A new study by Infonetics Research that surveyed service providers in North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Latin America-Caribbean, indicates that the top three technical challenges these carriers face are competition, migration to IMS, and capex reduction.

"Service providers are operating in a capped capex environment now — meaning, generally they purchase equipment only when they need it. There are some areas in which most carriers are increasing their capex, though: growth areas tied to additional revenue, such as VoIP," said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics for service provider VoIP, IMS and mobile infrastructure.

The study is based on formal interviews conducted by Infonetics' senior analysts with incumbents, IXCs, competitive operators, vertically integrated service providers, and specialists. The 85-page study examines the trends, drivers, barriers, and implementation plans of VoIP service providers, and features VoIP network architecture plans, a VoIP vendor scorecard, and service provider feature wish-lists for VoIP products, including trunk media gateways, softswitches, voice application servers, media servers and session border controllers.

Other highlights from the study:

• 40% of respondent service providers don't plan to complete their migration to Class 4/tandem switching until after 2009, suggesting they have enough capacity to handle international voice traffic growth
• The top retail VoIP service offered by service providers to their residential and business customers is voice over broadband
• In a series of questions asking service providers to rate Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens, Nortel, and Sonus, those familiar with the vendors rated Sonus highest for technology, product road map, security, management, and price-to-performance ratio
• 55% of respondents already have installed Acme Packet's session border controllers

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