Research and Markets has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "North American VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Services Markets" to their offering.

This strategic analysis is part of Frost & Sullivans continued coverage of the conferencing and collaboration marketplace. Within this analysis, Frost & Sullivan has identified industry challenges, market drivers, restraints, competitive factors, revenues, market shares and key market trends within the North American VoIP access and SIP trunking services market. With extensive primary and secondary research, this analysis provides VoIP access and SIP trunking service providers with a detailed look at the current and changing dynamics in the fast evolving VoIP access and SIP trunking services marketplace.

VoIP Access and SIP Trunking Enable the Integration of the Telephony Infrastructure with a Broad Range of Enterprise Applications

As enterprises look for cost-effective alternatives to their legacy TDM-based communication infrastructure, the VoIP access and SIP trunking services market will continue to build on its downturn-defying 40.1 percent growth in user base and 22.3 percent growth in revenues in 2009. Intense market competition and the resultant price pressures, at least at the lower end of the market, are likely to keep the subscriber base growing at a faster rate than revenues, translating to lower margins for the providers.

The majority of the installed customer premise equipment is still TDM private branch exchange (PBX) and therefore, a large percentage of the installed services base requires the deployment of media gateways for protocol conversion, while only a small percentage is direct/native SIP trunks connecting to SIP-enabled IP telephony platforms, says Frost & Sullivan Program Director. Going forward, that ratio is bound to change as customers increasingly replace their legacy systems with new, hybrid, or pure IP telephony equipment. As SIP emerges as the standard for IP telephony and broader multimedia communications, customers have been increasingly requesting service providers to bridge UC islands. SIP trunking allows enterprises to breach the confines of their voice-centric IP PBXs and embrace the broader multimedia communications environment enabled by SIP.

Enterprises that use their IP telephony platforms only for voice face few network integration and management challenges, but those that want the benefit of a more integrated communications solution, require additional capabilities to incorporate the application silos, including SIP trunking connectivity.

SIP trunking services are expected to gain momentum as companies increase their investments in IP-based communications applications and extend their UC environments beyond the enterprise to communicate with customers and partners, notes the analyst. Evidence of the return on investment benefits of SIP trunking has encouraged a number of service providers to start promoting these services in earnest. The market is undergoing a transition from traditional infrastructure to IP-based systems, wherein the revenues from legacy services are declining, but the new IP-based services have not yet taken off. This situation will change, driven by macro-economic and company-specific factors including technology evolution, and maturing standards and service levels. When that happens, carriers will start selling IP-based services and applications on a larger scale.

Meanwhile, service reliability and quality levels of VoIP access services have significantly improved over the years. Service providers are investing in enhancing their VoIP access/trunking services in terms of survivability, redundancy, and trunk pooling to be able to offer greater value, observes the analyst. Service providers have more or less overcome voice quality issues with their ability to provide different classes of service, dynamic bandwidth allocation, and voice prioritization capabilities. However, these improvements come with a heavy price tag, which belies the popular perception that VoIP is inexpensive. Service providers also admit that even though enterprises are curious about SIP trunking, awareness of its availability and benefits is still inadequate.

Market participants have to strategize cleverly, as VoIP access and SIP trunking are not suited to all types of customers. They will have to choose their clients based not only on their geographical spread, but also on the nature of business and status of their existing legacy contract. They can feel optimistic about businesses increasing tendency to consider these services, not just from the perspective of cost reduction, but as tools to achieve their long-term communication goals.

The following technologies are covered in this research:

• VoIP access
• SIP/IP trunking
• Unified communications
• Conferencing
• Time division multiplexing
• Public switched telephone network