The flexibility and openness of SIP have made it a key building block for VOIP services, but SIP also makes carrier and enterprise VOIP networks vulnerable to crippling attacks that could bring services down for days, according to the latest report published by Light Reading's VOIP Services Insider, a subscription research service from CMP's Light Reading.

SIP & VOIP: The Coming Security Crisis explores the vulnerabilities of VOIP networks to outside attacks and surveys available SIP security solutions, examining likely geographic expansion and providing an in-depth evaluation of the technology relative to its competition. It examines factors that vendors should address to promote growth, including technological and marketing issues. Additionally, it offers a detailed case study and provides a comparative analysis of some of the top companies in the SIP security arena

A new research study from Disruptive Analysis shows that evolution of mobile VoIP will rapidly eclipse voice over WiFi and become a mainstream form of communication. The analyst firm predicts that the number of VoIPo3G users could grow from virtually zero in 2007 to over 250m by the end of 2012. This is comfortably in excess of the expected number of FMC users with dual-mode VoWLAN/cellular phones.

The report demonstrates that it will be the operators themselves which will be mainly responsible for the push towards VoIP being carried over cellular networks. Carriers will become increasingly attracted to VoIPo3G because it will enable them to fit more phone calls into their scarce spectrum allocations, reduce operating expenses by combining fixed and mobile core networks, and launch new services like push-to-talk and voice-integrated “mashups”. VoIPo3G also fits well with the move towards femtocells. Future generations of wireless technology – 3GPP LTE (Long Term Evolution), 3GPP2 UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband), WiMAX – are “all-IP”, so unless mobile operators continue to run separate voice networks in parallel, they will inevitably transition to VoIP at some point.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of “2007 North America - Telecoms, Broadband and Mobile Statistics (tables only)” to their offering. In 2006, the Canadian mobile and broadband sectors continued to enjoy double-digit revenue growth rates. In contrast, local service and access revenues have remained stagnant whilst long distance revenues continue a downward trend. This has led to further regulatory amendments in 2007 towards a lighter-handed more market-based framework.

Reportlinker.com announces that a new report related to the Chinese telecommunication industry is now available to its catalogue. The VoIP business volume in China telecom operation market increased dramatically. Presently, the call duration of VoIP in China is the same to that of PSTN basically, but the growth rate of VoIP business is higher compared to PSTN. Up to Sep 2006, the IP call duration of telecom operators was 109.931 billion minutes, up 11.8% y-o-y, and accounting for 43.16% in the long-distance call duration. It is forecasted that the share of VoIP in the long-distance call market will be equal to or even exceed the total long-distance call of PSTN and mobile in the following two or three years gradually.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of “2007 Telecoms, Mobile and Broadband in Asia Report – Japan” to their offering. Japan’s telecommunications sector is one of the most active markets in the world. Into 2007, there was continuing strong growth, with Third Generation (3G) mobile services and FttH broadband leading the way. And at the same time, the adoption of VoIP and triple play services has been signalling a significant shift in the market.

The local telecom landscape continues to be dominated by NTT Corp, the world’s largest telecommunications operator. The company has had to face up to some big challenges in the market place. NTT has been busy pursuing KDDI’s big lead in 3G mobile. After lagging KDDI in the market for some years, NTT caught up and passed its rival in 2006. By 2007 mobile operator NTT DoCoMo had a comfortable lead. Though the 2G mobile telephone sector in Japan has entered a maturing market phase, the healthy expansion of 3G has seen the overall Japanese mobile market in a period of dynamic activity. More sophisticated handsets, and the popular built-in camera phones in particular, have been an especially interesting phenomenon that is certainly stimulating the local mobile data market.

Worldwide VoIP service revenue jumped 66% to $15.8 billion in 2006 after more than doubling in 2005, and is expected to more than triple by 2010, says Infonetics Research in its new "VoIP Services and Subscribers" report. Hosted VoIP services continue to outpace managed IP PBX services by far, with residential services fueling the market, but the business segment is also growing, and will continue to, the report says.

"Asia Pacific has been leading the VoIP services scene for a couple of years, with Japan's SoftBank pioneering the service and taking a strong lead, but the EMEA and North America regions have gained some ground at the expense of Asia in the last two years. The Latin American-Caribbean region is also posting impressive growth and gaining share," said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst at Infonetics Research and author of the report.

Yankee Group announces that consumer VoIP adoption continued at an aggressive pace in 2006, growing more than 125% and reaching more than 9 million subscribers. The consumer VoIP market maintains substantial growth, led by cable MSOs and broadband VoIP providers.

According to the Yankee Group Report, Growing Pains Persist in a Adolescent Market: Yankee Group's 2007 US Consumer VoIP Subscriber Forecast, published today, consumer VoIP services made headway by penetrating 9% of all US households, up from 4% in the previous year. VoIP is evolving beyond being a residential phone equivalent and is embedding itself into web-based advertisements, web site assistance and other click-to-call solutions. In addition, as consumers begin to demand inexpensive anywhere connectivity, there is more demand for mobile VoIP. The opportunity for VoIP on dual-mode mobile phones will increase as the number of units in use rises from 913,000 in 2006 to 22 million in 2011.

BroadSoft has been named the market leader for voice applications servers by research firm IDC. In its report "Worldwide Voice Application Servers 2006 Market Share Update," IDC identified BroadSoft and its award-winning BroadWorks platform as the market leader in 2006. The research was published as part of IDC's continuous intelligence services that provide written research, analyst interactions, telebriefings, and conferences.

"BroadSoft was the leading supplier and in general has enjoyed the best success in terms of geographic reach, penetration of Tier 1 service providers, and strategic partnerships with Tier 1 NEPs (network equipment providers)," stated Thomas Valovic, program director of VoIP Infrastructure for IDC and author of the report.

The market for consumer VoIP services boomed in 2006, with Europe leading the way, reports In-Stat. Total VoIP subscribers worldwide increased by 34 million subscribers in 2006, the high-tech market research firm says.

“Europe showed the largest gain in consumer VoIP subscribers,” says Keith Nissen, In-Stat analyst. “The European consumer VoIP market increased by over 14 million subscribers last year. The European VoIP market is being aided by local loop unbundling, the introduction of cable telephony and triple-play service bundles, as well as operator consolidation. In contrast, US wireline operators added only 4 million VoIP subscribers in 2006. No one seems interested in selling anything other than plain-old-telephone-service”.

Now available to businesses of all sizes, VoIP is experiencing rapid market adoption, offering the ability to reduce costs, improve productivity and streamline network management by converging voice and data communications over a single IP network. However, investigating and understanding the options available and deploying VoIP technology can be a challenging undertaking for many small and medium-sized businesses.

To help information technology and telecommunications managers address this issue, XO Communications has developed two new educational resources: The XO webcast "What Every Small and Medium Sized Business Should Know About Implementing VoIP" and companion XO white paper, "Ten Steps to a Successful VoIP Implementation: What Every Business Should Know". These resources outline the various factors that should be considered in determining when and how to implement VoIP as well as what type of VoIP solution is best for varying business needs. The webcast and white paper are hosted and authored by Tom Cross, a telecommunications industry expert and member of the Board of Technical Advisors for the VoIP Security Alliance. Cross is also founder and president of TECHtionary.com, the world's first and largest animated library on technology.

iBasis carried a record volume of phone traffic over the Internet during Mother’s Day. One of the world’s leading wholesale carriers of international long distance telephone calls – and operator of the world’s most extensive international VoIP network – iBasis terminated 54.9 million minutes of traffic during the holiday. The mark topped the previous record by 1.3 million minutes, set on Christmas Day 2006, and represented a 27.50 percent increase over Mother’s Day 2006.

Data generated by the company’s network operating center showed The iBasis Network completed a total of 7,139,922 calls during Mother’s Day. Analysis also showed Latin America overwhelmingly taking top honors in Mother’s Day phoning activity with countries from the region dominating rankings in call volume, increase over prior year and over average Sunday traffic, and length of call duration (see below for complete rankings).

Mainland China is expected to increase output of VoIP phones by 34 percent in 2007 to more than 29 million units, spurred by growing domestic and global demand, according to Global Sources' China Sourcing Report: VoIP Phones.

"China's VoIP phone industry is poised for continuous growth, with both production and exports forecast to grow," said publisher of the report, Mark A. Saunderson. "Manufacturers are developing product lines and raising output capacity."

The report indicates mainland China's exports of VoIP phones are expected to reach 21 million units in 2007 -- up 26 percent from 2006.

JupiterResearch projects that the VoIP telephony market will top 25 million US households by 2012, driven by greater broadband subscribership and the expansion by cable operators into new markets. In a report titled, “US Broadband Telephony Forecast, 2007 to 2012: Cable MSOs assert their dominance in the VoIP market,” JupiterResearch found the ability to successfully bundle broadband telephony with other relevant services will continue to drive consumers’ adoption of cable-based VoIP, which currently accounts for 71 percent of the VoIP telephony market.

According to the study, growth in cable-based VoIP will drive the market going forward. After more than 10 years in the telephony business, cable operators have finally struck a chord with consumers, as demonstrated by the acquisition of about 3.6 million new VoIP telephony customers in 2006.

The majority of the state's emergency call centers now receive 9-1-1 calls from customers whose telephone service relies upon VoIP technology. In a recently released report, the Texas Commission on State Emergency Communications provided a status of statewide efforts to provide 9-1-1 service to VoIP telephone subscribers. The CSEC VoIP Deployment Report is available at http://www.911.state.tx.us.

VoIP is the term broadly used to describe telephone services that transmit voice communications over a digital data network using Internet protocol technology. Since VoIP telephony is increasingly being adopted by the public, it is critical that VoIP customers have access to emergency services through dialing 9-1-1.

The North America small and medium business segment for hosted business-VoIP is set to reach US$416 million this year - from about US$165 million in 2005. Between 2005 and 2010, the cumulative growth rate will cross 56.9%, according to the latest study by AMI Partners Inc.

The market opportunity for hosted business-VoIP solutions for SMBs is huge and growing rapidly - and so is the competition, which is increasing with participation from traditional telecom and cable companies, equipment vendors, and focused complimentary service providers.