That's an awesomely bullish story of the IP Voice telephone market that LKON is getting into. Here's the story copied here:
Analyst sees $60 billion IP
phone market
By John Borland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
January 8, 1999, 4:45 p.m. PT
The worldwide market for IP-based telephone service
will skyrocket to $60 billion by 2005 as telephone
companies make "radical" network changes, according
to predictions by a London research firm.
The prediction, made by Ovum Research, far outstrips most
other analysts' expectations for how quickly telephone
companies will replace their traditional infrastructures with
Internet-style voice traffic.
Senior Ovum analyst Susan Sweet said that pressure from
corporations, some of which have already started to adopt
Internet Protocol (IP) functions and applications inside their
own internal telephone networks, will force the big telcos to
pick up the pace in shifting their infrastructure towards IP
traffic.
"As IP becomes the basis for wide-area corporate
communications, so the pressure from corporate customers
will grow on telcos to adopt IP in their backbone," Sweet wrote.
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IP telephony is the use of Internet packet-switching protocols
to transmit voice traffic, instead of the traditional network of
circuit-switches. The technology has been available for several
years, but the quality of calls transmitted this way still ranges
widely.
Sweet predicted that corporate use of applications such as
"unified messaging" services--which integrate voice mail, email,
pages, and faxes--and IP-based call centers would help boost
the use of IP telephony on private networks and ultimately
pressure telephony companies to modify their networks to
follow suit.
Already, some of the biggest telephone companies have taken
steps in this direction. As a part of its merger with
Tele-Communications Incorporated, AT&T has said it would
start moving its cable based local telephone services towards
packet-switched Internet protocols by the end of next year. The
company also is pushing IP telephony through its WorldNet
Internet service and in relationships with ISPs worldwide.
By 2005, the U.S market for IP telephony will have climbed to
$29 billion, Sweet forecast. Western European will be close
behind, with a market worth $13.5 billion, she said.
Other analysts are still less bullish on the speed of this
transition, however.
"You're talking about radical shift in the way voice is carried,"
said Bruce Kasrel, a telecommunications analyst with
Forrester Research. "That doesn't happen overnight, especially
in the telecom industry."
Kasrel said he thought it would be two to three years before
most of the big telcos begin integrating voice IP infrastructures
into their traditional networks, and that it would take another
two to three years beyond that for substantial progress to be
made.
"Even that's probably optimistic," he added. But he said that if
the telcos around the world did decide to move quickly, Ovum's
bullish figure could be in the ballpark. "If carriers decide that
packetized [voice transmission] is the way to go, then it could
be even bigger than that."
Analysts noted that consumers would not necessarily notice
much difference if telephone companies do change their
infrastructure to handle Internet-style voice transmissions.
"Does that really matter to consumers?" Kasrel asked. While
the cost of phone service might drop slightly due to
packet-switched technology's efficiency, consumers would
simply still pick up a traditional phone and dial as always, he
said. "If the transport mechanism changes, they won't know."
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