Q4 far better than Q3 for carrier VoIP equipment

According to the shipment numbers we have from vendors, Q4 seems to have been far better than Q3 for carrier VoIP equipment. In all the major VoIP categories that we track, there was a healthy sequential growth in revenue.

VoIP subscriber lines equipment (pure Voice over Broadband) saw a Q-o-Q growth of 66%. Over 8.8 million VoIP subscriber lines were sold in 4Q08. Alcatel-Lucent led the vendors with 20.4% market share. All Alcatel-Lucent VoIP subscriber lines shipped during the quarter were for IMS based VoIP deployments.

Out of the 8.8 million VoIP subscriber lines sold in 4Q08, an estimated 1.1 million lines were hosted IP Centrex while the remaining 7.7 million lines went towards residential VoIP deployments.

There was also a huge Q-o-Q growth in VoIP hardware as Huawei, ZTE, Genband, and Alcatel-Lucent continued to ramp up their media gateway sales.

Acme Packet market share in SBCs sank below 50% for the first time in two years. RadiSys on the other hand further improved its number one market share lead in the IP Media Server category.