(23 May 2006 8:00 pm)

MUMBAI: On the basis of a new study, ON World's director of research Mareca Hatler says services such as VOIP, video, music, radio, news and instant messaging coupled with mobile devices such as a WiFi enabled iPod and the ubiquity of broadband will result in 100 million consumer mobile VOIP users in 2011.

"The PC industry has found an ideal services model and this is the 'real time Internet,'" she says.

ON World interviewed 100 key technology influencers in several consumer markets as well as electronic retailers and discovered that 35 per cent were interested in VOIP combined with mobile entertainment devices.

"Convergence between the PC and Telecom industries has been the 'mantra' for the last several years. Skype, Google, device makers such as Apple, and municipal mesh infrastructure providers such as Tropos are creating the 'real time Internet' without them," says Hatler.

The studies conducted reveal that the PC industry will ship more than two times as many mobile VOIP devices per year as the Telecom industry in 2011. Real-Time Internet Services WiFi enabled mobile entertainment devices will make up 36 percent of all mobile VOIP devices sold in 2011. This will be driven by the popularity of Apple's iPod as well as products such as Nokia's Internet Tablet 2006 bundled with GoogleTalk.

These Mobile VOIP devices need infrastructure which Skype provides, with its 100 million PCs using their peer-to-peer telecommunications platform. Peer-to-peer technology not only takes advantage of efficient Internet routing, it saves Skype billions of dollars of infrastructure investment, the study adds.

Thus, ON World predicts that by 2011 Skype will have 25 per cent of the world's VOIP users and $1.2 billion in voice service revenues.