Infonetics Research recently announced the results of their market surveys in a press release entitled: 42% jump in session border controllers (SBCs) boosts 2010 carrier VoIP market.  It's always interesting to hear how the Voice over IP market is progressing and Infonetics Research provides comprehensive coverage for their subscribers each quarter (Dialogic is one of their subscribers).   At high level, this is good news for equipment vendors, but it's a mixed picture.   On the positive side, overall growth of 14.5 % in the quarter for the industry shows that Voice over IP is continuing its recovery from the economic downturn as carriers have increased their spending.   The report also highlights the march forward of the all-IP portion of the business, led by the very strong growth in SBC (Session Border Controller) sales. 

Diane Myers, the directing analyst for VoIP and IMS at Infonetics, ascribes the SBC revenue to ". . . increases in IP interconnectivity in fixed and mobile networks, growth in the number of VoIP subscribers, and SIP trunking."  The overall trend toward more IP to IP connections and a leveling of TDM to IP connectivity is one we've seen firsthand at Dialogic.  This trend has also helped SIP-based applications to grow, which can drag along related equipment sales for application servers, media servers and even media gateways.  For example, I've seen lots of activity in application areas such as messaging (voice mail, SMS, fax and so on), audio and video conferencing, business VoIP and hosted call centers.   The common theme for many of these applications is the move toward an all-IP application structure, but in order to connect to the subscriber base, there is usually other equipment involved. 

Integrated media gateways help rationalize signaling between the SIP used by applications and the circuit-switched protocols used by many subscribers, and also make any necessary media conversions for voice, fax and video.  In a similar respect, SBCs will often patrol the boundary between an application server hosted on a private IP network and the growing number of subscribers who connect to an application such as conferencing over the Internet.  As an example, at Dialogic, we make extensive use of conferencing for in-house webinars, but the participants have the option of joining via a dialup audio conference bridge - which will typically include a connection via a media gateway - or by connecting directly via IP over the Internet. 

I've been involved in the Voice over IP business over the last eleven years and it's heartening to see just how far we've come during that time.  In my early days in the industry, VoIP was considered an unproven technology and the big Tier 1 carriers didn't support it at all.  Now VoIP is omni-present within corporations, being widely adopted by all kinds of service providers and IP communication tools like Skype have become just another way to communicate, whether you are a grandmother, college student or an engineer.   Those early days of VoIP were all about connectivity, usually as a means to bypass the circuit network, but the trend now is toward ever more sophisticated rollouts of IP infrastructure and the availability of a broad array of IP-enabled applications.  In the process, the number of VoIP users has increased exponentially and the often staid telecom industry has transformed itself, with many of the biggest winners being those companies that caught the IP wave early and learned how to ride it to success.   Voice over IP may not seem as sexy as it did during the dot com era, but it works, is widely deployed and the quality of experience is getting better year by year.  That sounds like a success story to me.