VOIP Solution spending to go down?

VOIP has seen a great boom especially the enterprise and personal VOIP market in 2006 and the trend continued for the first quarter. However there are strong predictions of a possible US economony slow down and eventually affecting the rest of the slowly. I wonder how this will directly impact the VOIP solution market. When companies are increasing spending on VOIP solutions promotion through advertisements, will this business be lucrative enough to service the slowdown? I am sure some big companies providing VOIP solution like skype, Packet8 can still operate in deep pockets, however they will also feel the heat.

However, we can also relate the slowdown to another theory of cost cutting. When enterprises are on a cost-cutting mission, they tend to switch to VOIP solution over tradition telecoms but this might make the VOIP solution more competitive and smaller companies will find it hard to sustain with lower margins.

Looking at this graph, The future looks optimistic but i guess the data is a bit old(2005) and it doesn't consider the possible US slowdown which will not only hamper most of the US businesses but might effect the buying power of the consumers. In turn hugely affecting the VOIP solution market. According to the Graph, there might be additional 5 million lines added to VOIP. I suspect that this number might not be in reality, might be close to around 3-3.5 million.

As I debated earlier, the trend could be reversed with an optimism of saving money with VOIP. Especially with enterprises, this could be a strong possibility, but i am afaird the plain vanilla personal VOIP user might think differently.

Only time will tell how VOIP will sustain against the market forces and will it be a dark horse or just a looser.

Ask yourself, Would you buy a new VOIP service or product in case of a economic slowdown? Answe yes or No in comments along with your debate.

Table is open for debate :-)