VoIP services juggernaut Skype has seen its share of international calling minutes jump to 12% in 2009, a 50% increase compared to the year before. And as you can tell from the pie chart below, 54 billion minutes out of 406 billion in total were accumulated by users calling each other Skype-to-Skype last year. Are you listening, carriers?
The numbers hail from a report published by TeleGeography, a benchmark research service for the international long-distance telephony industry.
TeleGeography says international call volume from telephones has grown at an annual rate of 15 percent over the past 25 years, but that growth has been slowing for the past few years. In the past two years, specifically, international telephone traffic annual growth has reportedly slowed to a mere 8 percent, growing from 376 billion minutes in 2008 to an estimated 406 billion minutes last year.
Skype’s traffic, however, has soared. The service’s on-net international traffic (between Skype users) grew 51 percent in 2008, and is projected to grow 63 percent in 2009, to 54 billion minutes.
TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert refers to Skype’s estimated volume of traffic as “tremendous” and goes on to say that Skype is now by far the largest provider of cross-border communications in the world.
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Just yesterday, Skype Journal reported that the service has seen an all-time record number of concurrent logged on users: 22 million people signed in to Skype at the same time.
Or what the disruption of an industry looks like in figures and charts.
Tomorrow, eBay is set to release its latest quarter earnings, which means we’ll be able to match these traffic growth numbers with reported revenue figures. In October 2009, we reported on Skype hitting 521 million users and $185 million in quarterly revenue.
(Via Skype blog)
