Research: The size of the Internet telephony market will reach 40 billion U.S. dollars by 2015

The Point Topic Research Institute released a report that the Internet telephony market will increase revenue by 2015 to reach US$40 billion.

The Internet telephony market is expected to grow by 12.6% this year and revenue is 17.3 billion U.S. dollars.

In general, if both parties to the call use Internet telephony services, the fee is free, and Skype is.

Point Topic analyst John Bosnell said: "The development of Internet telephony has experienced twists and turns, but there are signs that this market is accelerating growth."

The agency expects that by the end of 2015, the number of global fixed-line broadband subscribers will reach 750 million, and these people are potential users of Internet telephony. However, Point Topic also sent uncertain signals about the outlook of the Internet market because more and more users use mobile phones instead of Internet phones.

Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion last month. The latter has nearly 150 million users, but the number of paying users is far below this figure. By the end of 2010, the number of Skype paid subscribers was 9 million, and the average spending per person per month was 8 US dollars.

According to this figure, starting from 2016, Skype's annual revenue will reach 2 billion US dollars.

Microsoft plans to integrate Skype into a number of products, such as Windows Phone and Outlook.