Forecasting the Taiwan Customer Market for Internet Telephony

Recently, Internet Telephony (IT) has become an increasingly popular telecommunications service due to its low cost. Accordingly, this study uses the stated preference method to analyze demands in the IT communications market and provide product and price strategies to Internet service providers. For this, I divide the market into two segments, “owning a computer” and “without a computer” groups. Furthermore, five IT attributions were chosen: voice transmission quality, calling rate, operation time, traffic jam (line busy) and additional features. The results indicate that the multinomial logit model was not significant in the “without a computer” group. Whereas calling rate, voice transmission quality and traffic jam are the three critical factors in the “owning a computer” group. The product strategy of VoIP providers should emphasize increased voice transmission quality and solving the problem of traffic jams. This study also formulates ten different price strategies and estimated their market shares, finding that IT advice had more than a 30% market share if IP devices were cheap and users are familiar with VoIP.