Telecom : Market Growth

Market Growth
By 2001, there were just over one billion telephone lines in the world and the growth for new telephone lines is over 7% per year. The market for public telephone networks is changing from delivery of voice service to data services. In 2000, approximately 97% of all residences in the United States had telephone service. Telephone voice traffic (measured in minutes) has been growing at a rate of nearly 8% per year.

Voice Service
Voice service (telephone line) is any service or feature accessible through the LEC/CLEC or IXC that can be accessed via a standard analog or digital telephone. The key reasons for growth in the number of telephone lines include dial-up Internet access, fax telephone lines, and mobile telecommunications. Figure 1 shows the growth of new telephone lines worldwide. This chart shows that telephone service subscribers continues to grow over 7% each year. Growth had been fairly level at about 50 million additional telephone lines per year. However, during 1999 more than 100 million new telephone lines were added. The recent surge in the number of telephone lines can be explained by the fact that more areas of the world are adding infrastructure to support new technologies that use telephone lines.


Figure 1: Worldwide Telephone Market Growth

Data Transfer
Data transfer is the act of moving data through a network from one data source to another. Generally theses sources are computers and they interface with the network via modems or channel service units (CSU’s). Data transfers can occur over a dial voice grade connection or via a dedicated line.

In 2001, the number of customers that use the Internet was increasing at a rate of nearly 40% a year while data traffic on the Internet (amount of data per user) is expanding at a rate of nearly 100% per year. The amount of data that was transferred over the Internet in the United States in 2000 averaged 27,500 terabytes (1,000 billion bytes) per month. The data transmission on private networks grew 500% between 1997 and 2000 with an average of 3,000 terabytes per month transferred in the United States. Figure 2 shows the data transmission growth within the public telephone networks.


Figure 2: Data Transmission Growth.