A new report by Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS, Infonetics Research finds that deployments of VoLTE services slows down the IMS equipment market - "The global service provider VoIP and IMS market totaled $878 million in 2Q14, down 6% from 2Q13, and down 12% sequentially .. Huawei and Metaswitch are the standout IMS/VoIP vendors in 2Q14, bucking the down quarter"

"To date,

Mobile networks vendors continue to claim that their built-in VoIP (VoLTE) beats OTT's VoIP in all aspects - efficiency,performance and quality.

We saw internal research from Nokia - see "NSN: VoLTE Beats OTT VoIP 4:0 !" - here and "Nokia: VoLTE is Doing Better than OTT's VoIP Under Load" - here.




Alcatel-Lucent joins the trend and announces "the results of an independent research study [

Gerald Reddig [pictured], continues its story on Nokia's testing of VoLTE vs. OTT VoIP [see "NSN: VoLTE Beats OTT VoIP 4:0!" - here].

The first report showed clear advantages to VoLTE in battery, bandwidth and signaling consumption.




However ... "These tests, however, were conducted under ideal radio conditions with no network load. The Smart Labs team was curious what the results would be

Tektronix Communications announced that it has been ".. selected as the provider of monitoring & assurance solutions to optimize network performance and quality for Thailand’s market-leading operator, AIS.

.. In Phase 1 of the project, Tektronix Communications will monitor pure voice and VoIP session traffic across all parts of the core network using its Iris Session Analyzer and Iris Packet

A new report by Diane Myers [pictured], principal analyst for VoIP, UC, and IMS, Infonetics Research finds that "Worldwide service provider VoIP and IMS equipment revenue totaled $992 million in 1Q14, an increase of 37% from 1Q13, but a sequential decline of 9% .. the standout vendor in 1Q14 is Alcatel-Lucent, rising to the top due to strong growth of core IMS and voice application server

Amdocs announced that "TIM Brasil has deployed Amdocs Unified Communications to power its new "blah" service. blah provides an unmatched user experience across all the subscriber's devices centered on a unified address book, merging device and social network contacts. The app saves money for the subscriber and keeps them inside the TIM Brasil brand while they use messaging and communication

Gerald Reddig [pictured], Nokia Solutions and Networks, explains in company's blog why VoLTE is good for MNOs - technically.



"NSN Smart Labs recently tested both client groups, OTT VoIP and VoLTE" and found that in all 4 measured KPIs VoLTE is better:

VoLTE clients consumed approximately 40% less than OTT VoIP clients. 

OTT VoIP clients generated up to 10x more data connections in the

Asaf Gilad [pictured] raises some doubts in Calcalist regarding the acquisition terms of Viber Media by Rakuten (see "[No longer a denied rumor] - Viber Sold for $900M" - here).

According to Asaf (who was the first to report about the acquisition process - here), Viber's shareholders will get a small portion of the $900M now, and the rest in two milestones based installments - $600M related to

Asaf Gilad reports to Calcalist [here, Hebrew] that Viber, the VoiP/chat application is about to be acquired by an "Asian competitor in the chat space" for $300-400M.

According to the article, Viber has 200M registered users, of which third are in Asia. The company has 120 employees - in Israel (40), Belarus and the headquarters in Cyprus.

Viber has some "sponsored data" agreements with MNOs

A new report by Anthony Cox, Juniper Research finds that "Mobile network operators will generate revenues of close to $20 billion by 2018 through strategies involving internet based voice or 'carrier OTT' .. These Internet voice revenues will be derived from new service propositions and bundles delivered through partnerships with stand-alone OTT (Over The Top) service providers .. while OTT

TeleGeography reports that "According to new data .. Skype’s international traffic volume continues to soar ..  Skype’s on-net (Skype to Skype) international traffic grew 36 percent in 2013, to 214 billion minutes .. While the volume of international telephone traffic remains far larger than international Skype traffic, Skype’s minutes are growing much more rapidly. Skype added approximately