Siemens was the top vendor of carrier IP telephony gear in the third quarter of 2005, in a market up 60 percent over the previous year, and 19 percent over the previous quarter, according to a new report by Dell'Oro Group.

Sales of media gateways showed the greatest growth for the quarter, rising 23 percent, while softswitches were up 14 percent. Much of the demand for media gateways came from carriers building out their class 4 core networks, says Steve Raab, director of IP telephony research at Dell'Oro. Geographically, Latin American, Eastern European and Asian carriers generated a significant portion of the sales boost.

The market is rising faster than expected, according to Raab. "What caught people by surprise was that the momentum that built up over the last couple of quarters has been very strong," he says. "A year or so ago, the attitude was that there are a lot of trials and some deployment going on, but when is the momentum really going to be picking up? And that mindset has really changed."

But consumer VoIP remains more a future than a present-day market driver. "The big push that drove things wasn't necessarily just voice over broadband subscriber growth," says Raab. "That area is gradually growing, but it wasn't the most compelling piece of the market this quarter. In all of their core activities, the carriers are preparing their networks for when the whole access domain will be based on next-generation networks."

Following Siemens, the top five vendors were Nortel, Huawei, Cisco and Ericsson.