US has overtaken Japan in retail VoIP subscriber numbers
One of my closer friends, who happens to be a doctor, is filling me in on news about the US economy these days. Doctors here have a poor reputation of knowing anything beyond their profession. But when we parted ways yesterday he asked me whether I was going to keep an eye out for Fed rate cut this week. If my friend is tracking the situation, I guess it must be worrying then. But to cheer our American friends up, my estimates suggest that the US has – as long expected - overtaken Japan in retail VoIP subscriber numbers.
At the end of December 2007, US had an estimated 16.1 million subscribers while Japan had a total of 15.7 million. Another development that has taken place is that NTT has emerged as the largest retail VoIP service provider in the world. With 5.032 million customers, it overtook Softbank BB in 4Q07 who actually slipped back from 4.8 million subscribers as of end 2006 to around 4.3 million VoIP subscribers. After NTT, therefore, Comcast is number 2 VoIP service provider in the world. In total, there were estimated 64.7 million retail VoIP subscribers worldwide as of end December 2007.
