VoLTE has fuelled the telecom service provider voice over IP (VoIP) and IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) equipment market to increase 12 percent to $4.2 billion in 2014.

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Huawei has 26 percent of worldwide the carrier VoIP and IMS market revenue share in 2014.

Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Nokia Networks are the other vendors.

Telecom operators’ urge to transform their mobile networks to become more cost effective, and offer next gen voice services such as voice over LTE (VoLTE) was the main growth driver, said technology market research firm Infonetics Research, now part of IHS.

“We feel positive about 2015 with VoLTE activity continuing and voice over WiFi (VoWiFi) beginning to ramp,” Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS at Infonetics Research, said.

In Q4 2014, the carrier VoIP and IMS equipment market grew 21 percent sequentially to $1.2 billion, with IMS comprising 58 percent of total sales.

Trunk media gateways, session border controllers (SBCs), softswitches, voice application servers, call session control function (CSCF) and media gateway control function (MGCF) were the main pillars with strong growth.

15 telecom operators in the US, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, Romania and Denmark have launched commercial VoLTE services, including AT&T, Verizon, KT, NTT DoCoMo and TDC.

While all major geographical regions posted growth in 2014, CALA (Caribbean and Latin America) grew 42 percent due to the expansion of fixed-line VoIP networks.

VoLTE-related equipment sales will pick up in EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) ahead of 2015 service launches by operators.

The service provider VoIP and IMS equipment market is expected to grow to $4.6 billion in 2019, the report said.

According to telecom industry body GSA, 66 service providers have invested in VoLTE studies, trials, or deployments, with 10 operators having already launched VoLTE services in 2014. Mobile service providers are turning their attention to the introduction of these new voice services, specifically HD quality voice, as a way to differentiate their services in a bid to compete with their main rivals and over-the-top (OTT) players.

Baburajan K
[email protected]