Scottsdale, Ariz. — The IP phone market is currently being dominated by business users, but will reach consumers in the form of “media phones” such as the Verizon Hub and AT&T Home Manager, according to a new report from In-Stat
According to In-Stat, business-centric IP phones will outsell consumer models by 10-to-1 by 2012, when a total of 31 million IP phones are expected to ship.
Some of the slow consumer adoption is owed to marketing, as cable-based VoIP services are sold as traditional landline service, using analog telephones, In-Stat said. Cisco, Avaya and Nortel lead the market for business IP phones while Uniden has the top share in consumer IP corded phones.
While IP phone penetration will grow, the struggling economy will slow the growth of VoIP, In-Stat said.
According to a survey of enterprise-sized business users, 32 percent said the economy had slowed their VoIP deployments.
A little more than one-third of businesses that have deployed VoIP use it exclusively. Others use it in conjunction with other services. Small businesses tend to use VoIP service exclusively, while larger businesses will opt for partial deployments, In-Stat reported.
