VoIP vs. traditional telephony

As of 2003 approx. 14% of International traffic to/from the US is via VoIP, based on 24 billions minutes vs. 170.7 billion minutes via PSTN [Metro 2004] (the article cites the source of data as TeleGeography Research Group/Primetrica Inc.)

According to the TeleGeography Report, in 2011 the international voice traffic was roughly 320 billion minutes of TDM and 144 billion minutes of VoIP traffic^†- see: http://www.telegeography.com/research-services/telegeography-report-database/index.html Note their 2013 figure: Where Did the Growth Go?: The Skype Effect.

Traditional operators replacing their exchanges with IP telephony, see Niels Herbert and Göte Andersson, “Telia ersätter all AXE med IP-telefoni”, Elektronik Tidningen, #3, 4 March 2005, page 4.

For information about the development of the AXE switches see [Fridlund 1997].

^†These numbers are estimated based upon their plot entitled “International Call Volumes and Growth Rates”.

Slide Notes

“FCC boosts Web phones, frees them from state rules”, Metro, New York, 10 November, 2004, pg. 9

[Fridlund 1997] Mats Fridlund, “Switching Relations: The Government Development Procurement of a Swedish Computerized Electronic Telephone Switching Technology”, Innovation Systems and European Integration (ISE), Report of research project funded by the Targeted Socio-Economic Research (TSER) program of the European Commission (DG XII) under the Fourth Framework Program, European Commission (Contract no. SOE1-CT95-1004, DG XII SOLS), coordinated by Professor Charles

Edquist of the Systems of Innovation Research Program (SIRP) at Linköping University (Sweden). Sub-Project 3.2.2: Government Technology Procurement as a Policy Instrument, December, 1997.

http://www.tema.liu.se/tema-t/sirp/PDF/322_6.pdf Links to an external site.

Transcript

[slide47] Well, there was, of course, a big battle between VoIP and traditional telephony because as users started moving away from phone calls, operators were starting to lose revenue. By 2003, 14% of international traffic was already being carried by VoIP. And lots and lots of traditional operators got very nervous, but here in Sweden, Niels Herbert and Göte Andersson actually in an article that appeared in Elektronik Tidningen in March of 2005 said, Telia is going to replace all of its AXEs, which were their public telephony switches, with IP telephony. And they said they were going to do that within 10 years. And suddenly, this telecom company became one of the biggest what kind of companies in Sweden? It's a very surprising thing. They became a big real estate company. Why? Because they sold off all the buildings that they had previously with these big switches in them because they didn't need a big switching center to have all the wires come to one spot to have a switch there for a central telephony switch. I could turn that into IP traffic in localized places anywhere that I had a high bandwidth fiber connection instead of twisted pair wiring all running to one big building. So they sold all those buildings. They made a lot of money doing that.