The research firm TeleGeography reported on Wednesday that the
U.S.A subscribers to Internet-based telephony services grew 21 percent to 6.9 million in the second quarter 2006, with cable TV companies expanding their lead in market share compared with Vonage and other pure-play providers.
The latest tally on the market for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), marks a 153 percent increase compared with mid-2005. But the second-quarter gain was slightly slower than in the first quarter, when it grew by 28 percent, TeleGeography said. VoIP revenues for the second quarter were up 173 percent at $607 million across the , compared with a year-ago level of $221 million. Big players now include Skype and other newcomers like Jajah.
VOIP provides must support this four major telecommunications protocols to survive in the market:
a) SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol, is a signaling protocol for Internet conferencing, telephony, presence, events notification and instant messaging. SIP was developed within the IETF MMUSIC (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control) working group, with work proceeding since September 1999 in the IETF SIP working group.
b) IAX2. The IAX revision 2 protocol is used by the Asterisk VOIP PBX as an alternative to SIP, H.323, etc. when connecting to other devices that support IAX (a limited list at the moment, but growing very rapidly).
c) H.323 A standard approved by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that defines how audiovisual conferencing data is transmitted across networks. In theory, H.323 should enable users to participate in the same conference even though they are using different videoconferencing applications.
d) POTS The “plain old telephony system” to call any telephone on the public switched telephone network, whether it's a standard landline or a mobile phone.
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