VoIP equipment sales up over 50%

Media gateway and softswitch IP port shipments rose 51.2% over the last quarter with Nortel Networks holding the lead in overall shipments, according to new data from Dittberner Associates.

Dittberner’s Worldwide NGN research Program, which tracks quarterly shipments from more than 35 equipment providers, found that Nortel led the worldwide softswitch market in the quarter with 24.83% of the ports shipped.

Huawei Technologies, China’s largest vendor in the sector, grabbed second place with a 21.86% market share in softswitch ports and took the lead in VoIP Media Gateway with a 24.85% marketshare for the quarter.

Sonus Networks was third in softswitch ports with 14.97% and fourth behind Cisco Systems in media gateway ports with 14.02% of ports shipped. Cisco was not on the softswitch list but shipped 15.81% of the gateway ports.

Worldwide, Ericsson made the gateway list with 10.61% of ports shipped while Siemens and Italtel rounded out the softswitch list with 11.31% and 9.71% respectively.

However, in a regional focus that removes Huawei from the picture because of its concentration in China, Nortel and Sonus came in first and second in the North American market in both softswitch and media gateway ports. Siemens was third in softswitch rankings and Cisco third in gateway rankings.

In the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regional ranking, Nortel dropped to third behind Italtel and Cirpak in softswitch ports and behind Ericsson and Cisco in gateway ports.

Dittberner Associates is an international market research firm founded in 1966.

While Dittberner tracks ports shipped, Infonetics Research looks at the overall market from a revenue perspective and reported last week that worldwide next-generation voice product revenue totaled $452 million in the third quarter, up 13% from the previous quarter, and up 69% year-over-year. Infonetics projected revenue to grow from $1.3 billion in 2003 to $4.8 billion in 2007, representing a strong CAGR of 39%.

The firm said Voice application servers, session border controllers and softswitches, especially Class 5 licenses and revenue, grew the most, signaling a change in pure infrastructure investment to investment in equipment built to support new services.

Infonetics said Class 5 softswitch revenue was up 34% to $76 million in the quarter and the worldwide media gateway market grew 5% from last quarter, mostly from ATM switch-based voice gateways.