Worldwide sales of service provider next gen voice equipment are up 5% in 3Q07 from 2Q07 to $956.4 million, says Infonetics Research in its "Service Provider VoIP and IMS Equipment and Subscribers" report.

Year-over-year, the next gen voice market is up 15%, the report shows.

Other report highlights:

• The service provider next gen voice equipment market is forecast to more than double between 2006 and 2010, when it will reach $6.9 billion worldwide
• The number of worldwide residential and SOHO VoIP subscribers will grow to nearly 172 million in 2010, led by the Asia Pacific region
• Worldwide media gateway manufacturer revenue is down 4% in 3Q07 over 2Q07
• Nortel takes back the lead in worldwide softswitch revenue market share, pushing Nokia Siemens to 2nd; Huawei remains in 3rd
• It's a tight race for the lead in the trunk media gateway market, with Sonus edging back into the lead, followed closely by Nortel and Cisco

Infonetics' report tracks VoIP subscribers and carrier VoIP equipment, including high-, mid-, and low-density trunk media gateways, SBCs, media servers, class 4 and class 5 application softswitches, voice application servers, and IMS core equipment, including home subscriber servers (HSS) and CSCF servers.

The report provides analysis and rankings for Acme Packet, Alcatel-Lucent, AudioCodes, BroadSoft, Cantata, Thomson Cirpack, Cisco, RadiSys (Convedia), Ericsson, GENBAND, Huawei, Italtel, MetaSwitch, Comverse (NetCentrex), NexTone, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nortel, Sonus, Tekelec, UTStarcom, Veraz, Verso, Xener, and many others.