VoIP revenues in North America to increase by 1431% by 2009 !

according to an Infonetics Research report , Voice-over-IP service revenues are poised for phenomenal growth in North America . That report predicts a growth rate of 1431% for VoIP service revenues, as they increase from $1.3 billion in 2004 to $19.9 billion in 2009.
That increase is predicted despite the fact that most businesses recently surveyed by Infonetics expect to provide their own VoIP, using a service provider pipe and premises-based VoIP gear.
VoIP revenues in 2004 represented less than 1% of total wireline carrier revenue.

Many service providers are still trying to figure out how to structure their hosted voice offerings, as well as how to bill for, manage and secure VoIP services. Particularly in courting business VoIP customers, service providers have to develop a mix of offerings that takes into account both hosted services and managed IP-PBX offerings. Service providers must be able to mix and manage customer premises solutions with hosting solutions even for one customer, since a business often has small offices that need a hosted solution, but also need the same feature set as the premises solution at corporate headquarters.
Service providers also are trying to sort out what falls into the flat-rate “all you can eat” category of voice service and what advanced features will generate badly needed revenue or create competitive differentiation.
Single office/home office (SOHO) users will be a major growth category for VoIP, the report predicts, growing from 1.1 million in 2004 to 20.8 million in 2008. Business-hosted VoIP service revenue is getting off to a slower start than that of managed IP-PBX services, but is expected to overtake those revenues by 2006 due to significant growth in the small to mid-sized market, according to Infonetics.