Last quarter was mostly bad for earnings reported by Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and others due principally to a slowdown in network equipment purchases.  A casual observer of our industry might surmise that not all was well and they would be wrong. Closer examination of the network equipment providers sales numbers shows that products related to IP communications rose quarter over quarter and year over year. That is extraordinary. While I don't usually mention Broadvox's competitors, Cbeyond plans to double the size of its operations in Georgia, creating more than 600 new jobs. Granted their counting is becoming similar to the way our government counts, those jobs will not all come in 2009 but should be on record by 2013. The more valid point is there is continued growth in IP Communications. XO, while suffering a small loss, saw growth in its IP networking business. Broadvox continues to see exciting growth in its VoIP/SIP Trunking business. Our VARs are finding that leading with an IP solution can show great ROI and in some cases provide an upgrade of equipment with SIP Trunking service and actually reduce the actual monthly spend of a business user.  (More on the business cases in future blogs.)

Finally, another story caught my eye as it related to forecasts for IP networking growth. From their press release... "AT&T, NEC Corporation of America and Corning Incorporated today presented the results of another record-setting optical fiber transmission capacity test, using emerging network technologies to transmit data at 114 Gigabits per second over each of 320 separate optical channels on a single, 580-kilometer optically amplified link, resulting in a total bandwidth capacity of 32 Terabits per second. The new result exceeds the bandwidth capacity of the previous record-setting test by 25 percent..."

This is amazing new and amazing research. While it will take additional time to bring it to market. It is clear that we will need greater and greater capacity to carry the VoIP and data traffic going forward. AT&T noted that their IP traffic is growing at about 45% year over year.

I remind all of you, now is the time to make the investment in IP products and services if you are an end-user. Now is the time to sell IP products and services if you are a VAR or Dealer. Procrastinating will only cost you more money or loss revenues.

The IP community and ecosystem is only getting bigger and bigger!