Sale of softswitches and media gateways for the networking and telecommunications industries will double from $2.5 billion in 2005 to $5 billion in 2010, a report from the Dell'Oro Group said.
The research firm said that its recently published report indicates robust sales of Class 4 trunk networks drove the market for next generation network equipment in 2005. However, Dell'Oro Group predicts that Class 5 subscriber solutions will drive growth in the future as VoIP services gain popularity among both consumers and businesses.
'As service providers race to offer new VoIP services, most next generation networks will overlay the existing circuit switch networks,' said Steve Raab, director of IP telephony research at Dell'Oro Group. 'Initial IP multimedia subsystem (IMS) networks will follow a similar overlay strategy enabling service providers to offer fixed-mobile-convergence and multimedia services rapidly, while carriers defer the complete network transformation from circuit switches to a fully VoIP network to future years.'