Until today, we couldn’t have told you this: out of 97 million residential phone lines in the U.S., nearly 20% were VoIP subscribers. (Annoying technical footnote alert: this actually refers to “interconnected” VoIP, the most common form of VoIP service, which is voice service over a broadband connection that also allows users to both receive calls from and place calls to the public switched telephone network, like traditional phone service. We don’t track non-interconnected VoIP, which generally speaking, enables voice service between two computers on broadband only.)
Anyway, that VoIP fact comes from our latest Local Telephone Competition Report, which, for the first time, includes information about voice services delivered over broadband connections. Why, you may ask, has it taken so long for the Commission to get these numbers? Well, interconnected VoIP is a relatively new product, and the Commission is careful about imposing potential burdens, like data reporting, on nascent services. The Commission in 2004 began considering the idea of collecting VoIP data, and finally, in 2008, concluded that the time was right to collect those figures. While private data firms have for some time estimated VoIP penetration, the FCC now has hard data on VoIP subscribers, data that give us a more complete fact base for understanding voice services.
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