Residential VoIP still overcoming inhibitors

Titled 'Residential VoIP: Let's Get Naked', the study reveals that the slower uptake is attributed to several factors including a lack of and the high cost of broadband, poor quality of service (QoS), number portability and high complexity.

However, over the past 6-12 months, IDC notes there has been an upswing in consumers moving to residential VoIP services due to many of these inhibitors being overcome.

"A key driver to this is the bundled sell of broadband and VoIP together and more recently, the offering of Naked DSL services, which is a business model that has been enabled via regulation more than technical capabilities," said David Cannon, program manager, Telecommunications at IDC.

According to Cannon, throughout 2007 the Australia residential VoIP market enjoyed strong growth. At the end of CY07, there were an estimated 285,000 residential VoIP subscribers with an estimated value of $40.67 million.

“IDC believes that the network based VoIP service will become the dominant residential VoIP service offering in Australia over the course of the next 24 months,” he said. “Incumbent SPs in various countries across Europe and the United States have been offering Naked DSL services for the last two years in order to stymie their competitors' rollout of their own DSLAM infrastructure.”

Cannon said many consumers are now more reliant on their mobile phone than on their landline phone. A point of frustration for this type of consumer has been that in order to have a broadband connection, you still need to have an active PSTN line.

“This meant paying two access services fees when wanting only one service. Scalability and flexibility are synonymous with VoIP. The functionality that VoIP delivers, even at its early stages of maturity, supersedes that of the PSTN,” said Cannon.

He believes VoIP is ultimately a better product that also enables fixed/mobile convergence (FMC) and unified communications (UC).