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World plugs into VoIP cable services
Analyst predicts sales of $10bn by 2009

Robert Jaques, vnunet.com 10 Feb 2006

Increasingly availability helped global cable telephony service revenues to rise from $4.5bn in 2004 to $5.6bn in 2005, and analysts have predicted that the sector will be worth $10bn annually by 2009.

According to In-Stat, the widening availability of VoIP-based cable telephony services has resulted in thousands of new subscribers for operators including Time Warner Cable and Cablevision in the US, Videotron and Shaw Communications in Canada, and Liberty Global in Europe.

The market research firm also noted that VoIP is increasingly becoming the technology of choice for cable operators.

"The key attraction for cable operators is the cost advantage that VoIP offers in comparison with circuit-switched services," said In-Stat analyst Michael Paxton.

"Based on our analysis, it costs between 17 per cent and 25 per cent less to provision a VoIP cable telephony subscriber than a traditional circuit-switched cable telephony subscriber."

A newly published In-Stat report found that VoIP-based cable telephony is having a "big impact" in the US, fuelled by Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Cablevision.

The analyst firm predicted that US cable telephony subscriber households will reach 4.4 million by the end of 2006. Total worldwide VoIP cable telephony subscriber households are expected to reach almost seven million by the end of 2006.

In-Stat's report also noted that US cable operators are beginning to look beyond wired cable telephony services to the wireless world.

In November 2005, several leading cable operators announced an agreement with Sprint Nextel to develop a wireless telephony option for cable TV subscribers.