I found this statistical chart… but can appreciate the difficulty of getting the data altogether…

… this chart reminded me so much of the time I worked on the Nortel – Bay Networks acquisition in 1998. It was a $6 billion deal, and since both were big in USA, Canada and Europe, all three anti-trust jurisdictions wanted/demanded/were required to inspect the details of our transaction. In Europe, the goal was to prepare a summary of every pertinent product category compared to Nortel's. We have to scour probably a half-dozen industry analyst reports that overlapped, had gaps and just plain defined things slightly differently to give different results…. my job was to take all that gobbleygook statistics (some of which was 18-24 months old) and make sense of the math – and to make sense of the product definitions.

When is a Frame Relay Access Device that routes IP not a router? Why didn't people take the lower priced LAN ATM switch and try to make it a higher price WAN ATM switch? Well, actually people did try this: both Cisco (BBN LightStream 2020) and Nortel (Magellan Gateway) tried this to disappointing results. The regulator asked – "what was unsuccessful about it?"

"Well, we spent $50 million to give it the interfaces, the reliability and control you need in a WAN, but the customers were only willing to give us $20 million for our efforts," said I.

… Alex Goldman's got it pretty good. Top 3 VoIP providers are Skype, Vonage, Time-Warner… although it's not clear that digital telephony over cable is really VoIP. Here's his report. These #s are in thousands of users.

Note: data not available for many VoIP providers. Services in italics are digital phone.

Nice job Alex. Hopefully, merely publishing statistics will get the players to publish the number of subscribers to Alex or to their websites.

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