Survey: 80 million VoIP users in 2007

Almost 80 million people subscribed to voice over internet protocol (VoIP) services in 2007, according to new research reported on VoIP News.

The study by Infonetics Research found that sales of VoIP and instant messaging service equipment also increased by 19 per cent during the year compared with 2006.

A principal analyst for the firm told the site that the results show that the market for the next generation of VoIP equipment was maturing, as sales of traditional equipment such as media gateways and soft-switches, grew by single-digits compared to the previous year.

"Other types of equipment, namely session border controllers, media servers, and voice application servers, will generally grow faster for the next five years," they said.

According to a recent survey from Data Integration and Extreme Networks, over half of UK companies now use VoIP and 88 per cent are happy with their service.