A new report from the North American research house, Instat, reveals that the US is way behind its European cousins in consumer Voice over IP (VoIP) adoption – and this despite the fact that 2006 was a particularly good year for the technology globally with the wordwide total of VoIP subscribers increasing by 34 million.
The leading European VoIP adopters over the course of 2006 were France, Germany, and the
Netherlands. According to Instat analyst, Keith Nissen, “The EU market increased by over 14 million subscribers last year largely due to local loop unbundling, the introduction of cable telephony and triple-play service bundles as well as operator consolidation.”
By contrast the US added a mere four million new VoIP subscribers over the same period. Keith Nissen says US carriers “don’t seem interested in selling anything other than plain-old-telephone-service.” Read more.
2 Comments
Adrian Anderson
Being a US resident, I think there are several reasons that America is behind in adopting VoIP service.
1.) Everyone has gone mobile! Many Americans no longer have “home” phones, they depend on their mobile service for all of their telephone communication needs.
2.) POTS (plain old telephone service) is just as inexpensive as VoIP when it comes to local calls and if you already have it in place, why change.
3.) Even if VoIP can save you money on long distance calls, many people use their home phones for local calls and their mobile phones for long distance.
These are just a couple of things that I think have slowed the popularity of VoIP in the US.