BANGALORE: Despite being confined to closed user
groups (CUGs), IP telephony is gaining rapid momentum in India and
is expected to cross 1 lakh units mark this year. The industry
forecasts a 250 per cent year-on-year sales growth in IP phones.
V Pradeep, MD of ABS India, formerly Alcatel
Business Group, says most corporates are now embracing IP
environment for their new telephone deployments. In most cases, the
upgradation is from analogue to IP phones as India has a small base
of digital phones.
He said once the Indian government allows the
interconnection between IP phones and PSTN and mobile phones, the
growth would be phenomenal. "TRAI is working on the modalities for
interconnection. Globally also, this regulation is going away in
most countries," he added. IP telephony penetration is estimated at
over 10 per cent globally.
Karthik Natarajan, MD of Snom, an IP phone
vendor, says, "Besides big enterprises, there are signs now of
medium-sized companies going for IP phones because of benefits such
as scalability, ease of use, stability and improved productivity."
Some reports suggest that IP telephony a $10
million market in 2002, estimated to be $39 million in 2003, will
grow up to $270 million by 2008. The vendors like Cisco, Nortel,
D-Link and Snom are active in the Indian IP phone market. The market
here is dominated by SIP (session initiation protocol)-based phones,
while the IP telephony providers like Sify, Net4India and VSNL are
sinking big bucks in building SIP platforms.
Some observers have dubbed SIP as the protocol of
the future for VoIP, saying it is more Web-centric and can support a
wide range of voice and communications programmes than other IP
telephony protocols such as H.323 and media gateway control protocol
(MGCP).
IP telephony gaining momentum