Research: Small office spending on IP telephony to grow 83%

Small business and work-at-home businesses will continue to be a growth engine for broadband telephony services, a new study says, with a forecast of 83 percent growth between 2010 and 2015. In-Stat today said the "digital" voice service has been a popular form of VoIP, and home offices and small offices continue to adopt the service.

"Broadband IP telephony offers a number of advantages for small businesses and SOHO; primary among them is the low monthly service fee and negligible costs for long distance," said research analyst Greg Potter "Unfortunately it does not provide the scalability associated with hosted and IP PBX solutions. It also does not typically come with the service level agreements (SLAs) and quality-of-service (QoS) afforded by other solutions, which are general requirements for enterprise and medium sized businesses."

The research, part of In-Stat's Business IP/VoIP Spending Forecasts and Segmentation service, also predicts application-based VoIP will increase over 50 percent from 2010-2015, with mid-sized business (100 to 999 employees) spending seeing the greatest growth as a segment, increasing in excess of 10 percent between 2010-2015. The research also forecasts the professional services vertical market segment will spend over $3 billion in 2013.

For more:
- see this release

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