By Telecom Lead Team: The carrier VoIP and IMS equipment
market decreased 2 percent in 2011 from 2010 as legacy trunk media gateway and
softswitch sales drag on the overall market.
Huawei is leading the overall carrier VoIP and IMS market
in 2011, just ahead of GENBAND.
Regionally, North America and EMEA had the strongest
fourth quarter, posting carrier VoIP and IMS sales growth of more than 20
percent each.
In 2011, Latin America was the big standout, with a 34
percent increase in carrier VoIP and IMS equipment sales, as VoIP activity in
this region grows, particularly in Brazil and Mexico.
Infonetics forecasts the number of global IMS-based
subscribers to grow from 177 million in 2011 to 610 million in 2016.
However, we’ll see this trend shift starting this year
as the high-growth market segments — including IMS core equipment and session
border controllers — become collectively large enough to offset the ongoing
declines of the legacy products,” said Diane Myers, directing analyst for VoIP
and IMS at Infonetics Research.
Global sales of telecom service provider voice over IP
(VoIP) and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) equipment jumped 15.8 percent in Q4
2011 over Q3 2011, to $690 million.
For the full year, the overall carrier VoIP and IMS
market ended down 2.1 percent in 2011 over 2010, to $2.6 billion.
After four years of annual declines, Infonetics forecasts
the global carrier VoIP and IMS equipment market will reverse course and grow
to $3.8 billion by 2016, led by IMS sales.
Growth in the overall market is being fueled by IMS
network deployments as large service providers like AT&T, China Telecom,
China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom and NTT undergo network transformation projects;
cable operators such as Comcast migrate to new networks; and wireless operators
such as Verizon Wireless launch IMS for their LTE networks.
Vendors posting notable growth in the VoIP and IMS market
in 2011 include Huawei, GENBAND, Alcatel-Lucent, and Acme Packet.
