The mobile market is growing, up 1.4% to €417 billion in 2010. The strongest growth is posted by data services such as mVoIP, both on fixed and mobile networks, finds Visiongain in its recent “The Mobile VoIP Market Report 2010-2015.”
Analysts predict that sales of internet connections and data services on fixed networks will grow in 2010 by 7% to almost €200 billion. Mobile data services – such as mVoIP are posting even stronger growth: up 16% to over €140 billion.
The report also examines how the growing market share of smartphones offers potential for third-party applications developers in the mVoIP market. In 2010 for example, mobile phone users will download over 6 billion applications to their mobile phones, growing to 7 billion by 2013.
According to Visiongain, there will be opportunities for the mobile telecoms industry in the IP convergence/substitution market. By introducing fixed VoIP to cellular telephony and mobile VoIP to fixed telephony, operators will have the opportunities to grow on a unified voice and multimedia service experience.
“VoIP services are cheaper than circuit-switched services on traditional legacy networks. VoIP has diversified from purely voice implementation to a complete multimedia experience offering video calling, video conferencing, gaming and many other features,” the analysts say.
Visiongain claims that the global economic crisis appeared to have had only a slight impact on the global telecommunications and IT markets. After a slight dip of 0.5% in 2009, the information and communications (ICT) market will increase by 1.9% to €2.3 trillion in 2010 and by 3.7% to €2.4 trillion in 2011, according to the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO)’s forecast. The number of mobile subscribers (currently four billion) is set to reach 6 billion by 2013, and smartphones will outsell PCs by 2011, growing to over 50% of the total handset market share by the end of 2013.
As the report highlights, the strongest growth markets are in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India & China) countries – where in 2010 the Chinese telecom market will grow by 8% to €126 billion and the Indian market will grow by a staggering 15% to €40.5 billion. The inherent cost advantage of mVoIP may help drive and contribute towards wider proliferation of the telecoms sector for the near-term, by way of accelerated take-up among more price-sensitive consumers.
The research group also notes that the online social networks such as Facebook and Myspace have integrated mVoIP services to offer opportunities for development of third-party applications and software, as well as multimedia content and advertising. Facebook users for example currently send one billion IMs per day.
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