By Kimberly Koerth

The global business and residential VoIP services market grew 8 percent from 2012 to reach $68 billion in 2013. Worldwide growth in VoIP services revenue is expected to reach $88 billion in 2018.

Infonetics Research’s 2014 VoIP and UC Services and Subscribers report found that global residential VoIP subscribers totaled 212 million in 2013. Additionally, sales of hosted PBX and unified communication services rose 13 percent, with seats growing 35 percent thanks to continued demand for enterprise cloud-based services.

The report also found that SIP trunking shot up 50 percent from the previous year. That increase was driven by activity in North America with EMEA expected to join in as a strong contributor in 2014.

“Business VoIP services have moved well beyond early stages to mainstream, strengthened by the growing adoption of SIP trunking and cloud services worldwide,” said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research. “Hosted unified communications are seeing strong interest up-market as midmarket and larger enterprises evaluate and move more applications to the cloud, and this is positively impacting the market.”