Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Closer to home, StatsCan published a mess of statistics about the Canadian communications industry last week as well.  Highlights:

• In the quarter ending June 30, 2006, Canadian wireless carriers had profits of $996 million, a 36% increase from 2005. This is the first time that wireless profits have exceeded the incumbent telcos’ wireline profits, which were $822 million, down from $1.2 billion a year earlier.
• Wireless subscribers at the end of June were 17.2 million, up 10.9% from a year earlier. Wireless revenues were $3.1  billion, about 35% of the industry’s total revenues of $8.9 billion.
• The incumbent wireline telcos lost 706,000 residential lines in the preceding 12 months, and a total of 1.2 million residential lines in the past five years.  That represents a 5.8% year over year decline. Their business line counts grew by 36,000 in the past year, partially reversing a three-year decline (2002-2005).
• Cablecos had 750,000 telephone subscribers at the end of June 2006, six times more than a year earlier.

 

Fridays headline from Telegeography reads International carriers’ traffic grows despite Skype popularity.  Telegeography compares 2005 to 2006 share of minutes for Skype, VoIP carriers and Switched Traffic carriers.  There’s a pair of pretty pie charts which shows that total traffic increased from 272 billion minutes in 2005 to 313 billion in 2006.  VoIP traffic moved from 16.6% to 19.8%, and Skype traffic from 2.8% to 4.4%.  Naturally, the switched guys lost share.

4.4% of the global long distance traffic passing through Skype is a pretty amazing statistic.  However, the absolute numbers tell an even more interesting tale.

While in absolute terms, switched traffic continues to grow, it’s clearly growing much more slowly than VoIP, or Skype traffic.  Skype has nearly doubled its volume in just 12 months.  Telegeography forecasts that Skype will do 27 billion minutes of traffic this year.  If total traffic increases at the stately 15% of the past year, then Skype’s share by end of 2007 will be 7.5%.  And, if VoIP traffic continues to grab share as it has previously, then growth in switched traffic will slow to a measly 4.6%.

Not bad for a band of latter day Robin Hood’s from Estonia.