The summer season reaped quite a harvest for vendors of equipment for voice over IP as analyst firm Dittberner Associates reported this week what it called an impressive 67.8% worldwide market increase over last quarter.

In the firm’s Worldwide Q3 2005 NGN Shipments Analysis, Huawei led the charge with more than 12 million VoIP ports shipped in the quarter. The China-based company knocked Nortel out of the top spot for the quarter. Nortel shipped almost 3.6 million ports.

Siemens continued to grow its market and also leap-frogged Nortel by shipping 4.4 million ports. It now has a 16.08% market share. Both Siemens and Huawei can thank the 202% growth in the Asia Pacific region and the 81% increase in Central and Latin America for their gain in market share.

The North American market, perhaps due to carrier consolidation, Dittberner said, was down 12% from last quarter.

Altogether, vendors shipped over 27.3 million media gateway, softswitch and integrated VoIP ports during the quarter. Sonus Networks accounted for 1.16 million ports for a 4.26% market share and Tekelec shipped 1.52 million ports for a 5.56% share. Nortel’s market share came in at 13.13%.

Leena Deshpande, research analyst with Dittberner said that large-scale upgrade projects are increasing and will drive continued growth in the upcoming quarters.

The downside to the increase in shipments, according to the report, was that the nearly 70% increase was somewhat offset by pricing pressure from large contracts held the actual revenue increase to 49%. VoIP-related revenue during the quarter was $609 million, while the voice-over-packet and IP/ATM/TDM revenue was $671 million.

The report includes worldwide VoIP market size in terms of ports shipped and revenue, by product (media gateway, softswitch), architecture (distributed, integrated), class type (class 4, class 5), port type (IP, ATM, TDM). It also provides the regional breakdown of these shipments by ports and revenue, as well as the positions of all market players in comparison with previous quarters.