The numbers are starting to add up

Xten Networks has just reported that it has 500,000 softphones deployed (www.xten.com/news/20041020.pdf) globally. Add that to the 1.8m number reported by Voiceglo today (which as far as I know involves no double-counting with the Xten number), plus the 5 - 6m that we think represents the total Skype base, and we're talking about pretty significant softphone penetration worldwide. What would be even more helpful would be if any of the four competing IM platforms offering voice (AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, iChat) would deign to tell the world what sort of voice usage they are seeing. Then we could add that data to the list to get some sort of rough estimate of access-independent, device independent VoIP users. My guess is that it's a pretty respectable number.