Mobile VoIP users to top 100 million by 2011

The introduction of mobile devices such as a wi-fi enabled iPod, and the ubiquity of broadband will result in 100 million consumer mobile VoIP users in 2011, according to a study from research house ON World.

With many anticipating that Apple will add wi-fi and VoIP to its iPod to make the killer converged mobile entertainment device, the company, and other like it, will be in prim position to exploit the ideal services model – the real time internet.

ON World interviewed 100 key technology influencers in several consumer markets as well as electronics retailers and discovered that 35 per cent were interested in VoIP combined with mobile entertainment devices.

Mareca Hatler, ON World’s director of research, said: “Convergence between the PC and telecom industries has been the mantra for the last several years. But Skype, Google, device makers such as Apple, and municipal mesh infrastructure providers such as Tropos are creating the ‘real time internet’ without them.”

The PC industry will ship more than two times as many mobile VoIP devices per year as the telecom industry by 2011, Hatler believes. While wi-fi enabled mobile entertainment devices will make up 36 per cent of all mobile VoIP devices sold in 2011. This will be driven by the popularity of Apple’s iPod as well as products such as Nokia’s Internet Tablet 2006 bundled with GoogleTalk.

ON World predicts that by 2011 Skype will have 25 per cent of the world’s VoIP users and $1.2bn (ВЈ640m) in voice service revenues.

Tags: Telecom services, VoIP

This entry was posted on May 24th, 2006 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or Trackback from your own site.