VoIP Minutes 2009

Estimated 2,660 billion minutes of VoIP traffic was carried by service providers worldwide during the year 2009. Of these minutes, 842 billion was local call volume, 1,727 billion was National Long Distance (NLD) call volume, and 90.7 billion was the International Long Distance (ILD) call volume (see Figure 1).

For the purposes of attributing the traffic share to vendors we have considered the adjustments for double-counting. This is because, for instance, if a Cisco user (Carrier A) originates an international minute, and using TDM or IP format hands it off to UTStarcom user (Carrier B), while the minute should not be double counted for the purposes of estimating overall international VoIP traffic, both vendors should be credited with this voice minute. A scenario where this logic may not work is where the exchanging carriers are using the same vendor platform. In case of Cisco we believe that such a scenario results in a higher-than-actual market share of minutes.

If we allow for the double counted traffic, the VoIP ILD volume in 2009 was about 113.4 billion minutes worldwide, and VoIP NLD was 1,914 billion minutes. In the ILD category, Cisco leads the vendor market, with its platform having shipped an estimated 27.6 billion VoIP ILD minutes in 2009, which translates into 24.3% market share. As per usage of call agents, Genband leads in the ILD category with 14.5% market share.

The actual NLD VoIP traffic in 2009 was 1,727 billion minutes. However, allowing for double count, in 2009, service providers handled a total of about 1,914 billion NLD VoIP minutes worldwide. Having carried around 387.5 billion minutes, ZTE platform has a market share of 20.2% in NLD VoIP minutes for 2009. The vendor maintains the lead with the same market share if we count minutes by the use of call agents in NLD.

In 2009, service providers handled a total of about 842 billion local VoIP minutes worldwide through their call agent platforms. By virtue of a large Voice-over-Broadband (VoBB) gateway footprint, Cisco leads the category of VoIP local minutes by media gateway with a 15.8% market share. If we consider non-softswitch local VoIP traffic (i.e. VoBB local traffic), we are looking at an estimated 272 billion minutes with Alcatel-Lucent leading the vendors having carried an estimated 19.9% of the local VoBB traffic during 2009.

ZTE leads in the overall VoIP minutes in 2009 with a market share of 17.4% worldwide across both wireline and wireless networks (see Figure 2). ZTE leads because the company has the largest VoIP equipment footprint in high population countries China and India.