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Shopping mall parking lots weren’t alone in experiencing record traffic this holiday season. iBasis (News - Alert) Inc., a global VoIP company, reports carrying a record volume of phone traffic over the Internet during the Christmas and New Years holidays. iBasis terminated 53.6 million minutes of VoIP traffic during Christmas Day, a 30 percent increase over 2005, and 52.9 million minutes on New Years Day, up 38 percent from 2006.

“While they were certainly record traffic days for iBasis, the holidays may have been the two greatest 24-hour periods of Internet-based phone activity in history,” said Ofer Gneezy, president and CEO of iBasis, in a press release. “While VoIP continues its rapid growth we are able to leverage the lower cost of IP bandwidth and equipment to scale our network very efficiently to take advantage of the growth opportunity. We fully expect to set new records as soon as Mother’s Day, which has historically exceeded the traffic volume of the preceding holidays.”

In fact, according to Stephan Beckert, director of research at TeleGeography, a source for global telecommunications statistics and analysis, “VoIP has again seen a dramatic year-over-year increase, and with these record-setting holiday statistics from iBasis, it’s clear a worldwide migration to IP-based communications is well underway.”

Based on Telegeography projections and iBasis’ current annual run rate of approximately 12 billion minutes of traffic (Q3 2006), the company carries an estimated 20 percent of the world's international VoIP traffic. The iBasis Network is a global VoIP platform with over 1,000 points of presence in more than 100 countries. The lower cost of IP infrastructure continues to enable iBasis to expand the capacity of its network to accommodate dramatic growth with relatively low capital expenditure. Record traffic periods, which typically occur during major religious and national holidays such as Christmas, New Year’s, Mothers’ Day, Ramadan, Eid, Diwali, and Chinese New Year, demonstrate the scalability of the iBasis network. Phone traffic over the iBasis network on these holidays increases by 30 percent or more over non-holiday traffic.

In November, iBasis announced that revenue for the third quarter of 2006 was $133.5 million, compared to $94.6 million for the third quarter of 2005. Gross profit for the third quarter was $15.6 million, compared to $11.5 million in the third quarter of 2005.

Don't forget to check out TMCnet’s White Paper Library, which provides a selection of in-depth information on relevant topics affecting the IP Communications industry. The library offers white papers, case studies and other documents which are free to registered users.

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Cindy Waxer is a Toronto-based freelance journalist specializing in business and technology. She has written for publications including TIME, Fortune Small Business, Business 2.0, Computerworld, Canadian Business, and Workforce Management. To see more of her articles, please visit Cindy Waxer’s columnist page.