Recently a study emerged suggesting that, while the Carrier IP Telephony market was a bit on the down trend in terms of year-to-year comparisons, there was plenty of good news in that same trend within the component markets for the quarter. Now, a new study from Infonetics Research (News - Alert) suggests that the year-to-year picture may not be the best, but the second quarter's numbers are looking pretty nice indeed.

The Infonetics Research report shows that the carrier Voice over Internet Protocol/IP Multimedia Subsystem (News - Alert) (VoIP/IMS) market gained fully 30 percent in the second quarter, and this was primarily fueled by some major Voice over LTE (VoLTE) spending in the North America region. The total value of the market, according to the report, reached $936 million. But though the North American region's spending put a pretty hefty boost in the market, it wasn't working alone. All major geographical regions posted both year-to-year and quarter-to-quarter gains in spending for the second quarter of 2013. That VoLTE spending represented a pretty big jump by itself, as North America's LTE (News - Alert)-related spending is up 78 percent over the previous year.

As for the firms that are leading the charge in this market, major vendors—as expressed by revenue growth—include names like Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) and Sonus, as well as BroadSoft, GENBAND and Huawei. Three of those—Alcatel-Lucent, GENBAND and Huawei—also hold the top slots in terms of market share for the VoIP and IMS markets. GENBAND’s director of product marketing, Ashish Jain, will be participating in a panel discussion, entitled “SBCs – A Must for Your Enterprise IP Network,” at ITEXPO in Las Vegas next week. The company’s vice president of solutions marketing, Sanjay Bhatia, will additionally be participating in a session titled “Turning the Demand for Truly Unified Communications (News - Alert) into Revenue” at the event.

Summing up the report, Infonetics Research's principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS Diane Myers offered up some commentary, saying, “IMS equipment has officially moved into an LTE and voice over LTE world, and there's no going back now. In the second quarter we saw this impact spending on session border controllers and IMS core equipment for VoLTE access and interconnection (LTE to 3G) markets.”

While this particular rising tide isn't necessarily lifting all boats, at least not yet, there are still plenty of firms benefiting from the move to LTE and related systems. It's rational enough, at least on the surface. After all, it's an improvement over 3G, and with more mobile devices hitting the market and most of those users demanding improved connectivity thanks to more uses for these devices—VoLTE is just the start; consider the streaming video market and gaming to get a fuller view of the picture—improving development of the network that would power such changes is really only a natural outgrowth of the larger overall market. Sell more cars, and the demand for tires grows to match.

Still, it's looking like, in the short term at least, a good time for the tech sector, and improvements to network infrastructure and use should keep coming apace to match the growth in demand.