NEW DELHI: The global business and residential VoIP services market rose eight per cent in 2013 to $68 billion and are expected to yield a revenue of $88 billion by 2018.

According to Infonetics Research, SIP trunking increased 50 per cent in 2013 from the prior year, driven predominantly by activity in North America.

Infonetics Research says EMEA is expected to be a strong contributor for SIP trunking business in 2014.

“Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide. Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest up market as mid-market and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market,” said Infonetics Research principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS Diane Myers.

Sales of hosted PBX and unified communication (UC) services increased 13 per cent in 2013, and seats grew 35 per cent due to continued demand for enterprise cloud-based services, the report said.

Global residential VoIP subscribers increased eight per cent to 212 million in 2013.

Infonetics Research says managed services are benefitting from the continued adoption of IP PBXs: Roughly 10 per cent–20 per cent of new IP PBX lines sold are part of a managed service or outsourced contract.