VoIP Provider SunRocket Says Goodbye
Well there goes the end of the VoIP provider SunRocket. Turns out they were the largest Voice Over IP startup company next to Vonage. I actually have a SunRocket line for one of my personal lines. Not to worry they say that one of the bigger giant VoIP companies will take over the business. I guess SunRocket couldn’t handle the 200,000 customers they gained in a year. Read more in the NY Times Article.
ViaTalk is now offering a great promotion for existing SunRocket customers. They will buy out your contract and give you a free phone line with a new annual price of $199 per year. I looked into Via Talk and they offer some great features in their control panel. They are reliable and seem to have good reviews. I will probably switch my SunRocket line to this company. Click on the logo to see this new offer:
SunRocket, one of the largest start-up companies offering Internet phone service, has ceased operation and is moving its customers to one or more other companies, a person briefed on its status said yesterday.
A message on SunRocket’s customer service line said the company was “no longer taking customer service or sales calls.” Executives of SunRocket, which is based in Vienna, Va., and had 200,000 subscribers as of April, could not be reached for comment.
The development underlined the struggles of start-ups trying to make a business out of providing Internet-based phone service, telecommunications industry analysts said.
The companies face enormous pressure from the biggest competitors in the industry, both cable and traditional phone service providers. The cable companies in particular have made a strong push into the telephone market by offering the service as part of a package with television and Internet access.
Start-ups like SunRocket and Vonage, the largest and best known of the group, tend to offer only phone service, and they do not have the ability of the larger companies to ensure quality of service because they do not operate their own telecommunications lines, said Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Pali Research in New York. “They only have one product and they can’t control quality,” Mr. Greenfield said, adding that the business is “extremely challenging.”
According to estimates from TeleGeography Research, SunRocket is the second-largest Internet phone start-up, after Vonage, with a 2 percent market share.
In April, SunRocket said its 200,000-subscriber milestone was a testament to customers’ embrace of Internet phone service, which allows calls to be transmitted as data over the Internet.
As a selling point, SunRocket offered potential customers a year of unlimited calling in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico for $199.
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