The market for session controllers is expected to grow from $28 million in 2003 to $1.2 billion in 2008

(PRWEB) July 11, 2004 -- Research and Markets announces the addition of this new report entitled "VoIP Is Heating Up the Need for Native IP Peering" to its offerings.

The race to offer VoIP services has intensified during the past 12 months. Service providers are interested in hosted IP telephony and many already have begun rolling out the service. In a study with more than 25 European operators 50 percent intend to offer hosted IP telephony in the next 12 months. Of the operators interviewed, 83 percent would like to offer the service in 3 years. Trends in North America are similar, with incumbent service providers aggressively launching hosted IP telephony to small and medium-sized businesses. SBC is the first RBOC in the United States to publicly launch and market the service, which is currently available in 55 cities.

Carriers and service providers are increasingly using voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) for peering purposes to deliver new and enhanced services to enterprises. As such, VoIP islands are forming around the world and it is important to connect these islands together in order to have end-to-end VoIP calls. Session controllers are deployed at the edge of the network for two main purposes: carrier-to-carrier peering and carrier-to-enterprise peering. The market for session controllers is expected to grow from $28 million in 2003 to $1.2 billion in 2008.

Features that operators find most useful for carrier-to-carrier peering include the ability to:
- interwork between various protocols
- interoperate between different media
- gateways and other endpoints
- hide the network topology
- maintain quality of service (QoS).

This report explores the market for session controllers and the applications driving the need for these devices. It also identifies the features and functionalities operators will demand in the next 12 months. Conversations with numerous carriers and service providers underscore the importance of session controller functionality. However, these operators were asked whether they would prefer to have these features in a standalone device or have them embedded in existing devices such as softswitches, media gateways and routers. This report examines many of these issues and reveals what RBOCs and other operators would like to deploy in their networks.

For a complete index of this report click on http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/219694

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