VoIP ready to take off

It has been more than a year now since ILD market in India got deregulated but the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) market has not picked-up as expected. But now with the ILD rates going down and more players been given licen-sees to operate in, VoIP market is expected to take-off in its second phase.

Major VoIP vendors like NEC, Cisco and Avaya are expecting that market would grow up exponentially in the next three years and most of the players who are currently operating on EPBAX systems will migrate to IP telephony systems. 

And since adoption of IP phones in India is not much and looking at the opportunity three years down the line, these vendors are currently providing EPBAX systems that are upgra-deable to IP telephony systems at a nominal cost.

On the other hand, carrier providers like Data Access, BSNL and others are having a tough time with ILD rates going down but are hopeful that VoIP will pick up. The big sticking point for VOIP has been the tec-hnology. Despite heavy market interest, VOIP is still quite a new technology and until late hasn’t been ready for prime time. But still Internet telephony is not the ‘carrier killer’ that industry watchers initially pegged it to be. Although, the service pro-vides an alternative to standard


PSTN voice telephony, there’s no reason for traditional telcos not offering this and they are doing so.

The regulatory environment for Internet telephony services in India is primarily limited to international calling using PCs via services offered by Indian ISPs. PC-and-device-to-phone services are a compelling alternative to traditional phone service in India, where there are only three-four telephones per 100 people. 

According to Vegastream, supplier of dedicated business VoIP gateways, “The Indian market is pegged at around 


$ 5 million to $ 6 million per year.” Frost and Sullivan (Asia-Pacific) director Manoj Menon said, “The industry is in a state of transition from circuit-switch to IP technology and revenue growth has been dismal for the last few years. The situation is set to change dramatically with the value of the Asia Pacific telephony market expected to hit an excess of $ 2.34 billion by 2005.”

According to Frost & Sulli-van, telephony vendors are exp-eriencing minimal growth for the past year, with revenues of $ 2.05 billion in 2002, the indu-stry is set to experience an explosive market growth as IP (Internet Protocol) technology becomes mainstream.

According to the iLocus report, released In April, app-roximately six million minutes of Internet telephony traffic are being originated per month by the Indian ISPs. iLocus forecasts Internet telephony traffic to grow to 211 million minutes by the year 2007.

Rahul Gupta


CyberMedia News Service