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.
Comments (2)
Hello
I am a regular reader of your web site and I have a few comments on your ranking. I believe that Japan still leads the VoIP market with 16,766 million subscribers as published by the MIC (http://www.soumu.go.jp/joho_tsusin/eng/Statistics/pdf/080227_1.pdf).
For France, the figures are over-estimated : the last known figures from ARCEP in Q3 2007 are 9,727 million. With around 1 million new subcriber in the last quarter, we can estimate the french voip subcriber number to 10,7 million.
In the service provider ranking, France Telecom group is in second position with 4, 779 million subscribers thereof 4,102 million in France.
Based on MIC figures for the Q3 2007, where NTT had 47% market share, NTT has reached more than 7,5 million subcribers by Q3 2007 and should approach 8 M in Q4 2007.
Eric from France, the wordwide leading VoIP country in household penetration.
Posted by Eric | March 18, 2008 8:03 PM
Posted on March 18, 2008 20:03
Thanks for your detailed comments Eric. The 16.7m number that you quote from MIC is correct but it is the number of VoIP phone numbers being allocated to service providers. In Japan there are two uniique prefixes that are used for VoIP. While the numbers may be allocated to providers they are not necessarily activated/used.
Regarding NTT VoIP base, look out for Hikari Phone users in this excel sheet. They are at 5.032 million subscriber figure.
http://www.ntt.co.jp/ir/library_e/results/xls/21/data.xls
France: I know the subscriber number crunching gets tricky there because you have companies like Free who charge for a bundle and then don't reveal how many of their VoIP phone accounts are being used or how many of their IPTV accounts are being used. We take the overall subscriber numbers that subscribe to a bundle.
France Telecom: You are right. You guys are number 2 but if we consider your subscribers in all the countries. In France however you have only 4.1m subs. So that is what we are taking into account. cheers! JR
Posted by JR | March 19, 2008 11:41 AM
Posted on March 19, 2008 11:41