The VOIP Provider Guide

With the collapse and sudden closure of SunRocket, more than 200,000 VoIP subscribers woke up and found their phone service unceremoniously turned off. The result has left many customers with a bad taste in their mouth and set the tech community ablaze with rumors as to why a company with yearly growth and a decent user base shut its doors overnight.  However, on the flipside of things, companies like VoIP Your Life have stepped up to ensure that customers still willing to stay with VoIP phone service are given the opportunity to quickly and easily transfer their number and services with minimal interruptions.

  All of the existing features, reviewed previously here, are intact, including the Virtual Phone Numbers, free hardware and porting, all steps above the service these users enjoyed while with SunRocket. The existing adaptors from SunRocket do not work with VoIP Your Life’s service, though they do provide a new one for free after shipping costs. VoIP Your Life has also made it possible to receive the adaptor and necessary hardware with enhanced shipping services for former SunRocket customers with no additional cost. While portability of a former SunRocket phone number is not guaranteed VoIP Your Life offers a service to verify all numbers and locations that it can port. They have made it easier than most of other services to prove that you had previous service and that the number you are porting is from a transfer to VoIP Your Life from SunRocket. For that reason, VoIP Your Life has offered one of the more appealing service plans for prospective transferred users. 

There is no special discount from VoIP Your Life; however they do extend all of their existing special offers including the free hardware, number porting and virtual numbers. Additionally, the contracts that many users signed and prepaid with SunRocket do not exist with VoIP Your Life, thankfully cutting out any chance of users being shorted on their service if something happens.   Most importantly, VoIP Your Life has established a specific FAQ for former SunRocket users to learn more about the transfer of service and the possible changes that might entail. Though there is a definite anger among those 200,000 users who were ignored so easily, many companies have done their best to pick up the pieces. Whether companies like VoIP Your Life and VIA Talk are truly trying to help old customers or snag easy new customers for their service is up to the customers to decide. Ultimately, the repercussions of the SunRocket debacle are still being discussed and felt out by the VoIP community. It remains to be seen whether there will be a service backlash over their collapse. However, as the Yankee Group recently reported, regardless of technical or legal problems, VoIP service continues to grow.

The numbers are always an entertaining way to look at and evaluate the current VoIP trends, even if they tend to contradict what the public image of companies like SunRocket and Vonage is creating. However, as with any new technology, these are simply wrinkles that need to be worked out before the technology can truly flourish.

So say the numbers anyways. Mainly because of the support of cable television and internet companies like Comcast, VoIP service – usually bundled together with internet packages – has grown dramatically. At first wary of the fledgling technology, Comcast and other major cable companies have started bundling digital calling packages and have been selling them in droves.

The numbers tell the story; VoIP access via cable providers grew 167 percent 2006 to almost 6.3 million users from 3.9. The Yankee Group, a technology watchdog group, expects that number to jump to almost 26.2 million by 2011. The main issue though, according to the Yankee Group is that most users are unaware of how their new phone service works. The same surveys found that only 10 percent of Cable VoIP subscribers were aware that their phone service was now powered via the internet.

As for the companies that have managed to gather the most users in the VoIP field, Comcast has jumped to the top of the ladder with nearly 2.4 million subscribers, boasting an increase of over 800 percent. The increase was enough to take over the top spot from the previous VoIP leader, Vonage, whose recent woes and legal battles with Verizon have left the company weakened.

The main problem that companies like Vonage, which still managed to gain 1.2 million customers in 2006, are facing is that each new customer costs the company somewhere in the neighborhood of $300. This startup cost for the company, including advertising, expansion and line maintenance, is likely part of the reason SunRocket collapsed so easily despite the 200,000 plus customers.

Regardless of recent woes though, the Yankee Group sees increase growth in Broadband VoIP, expecting as many as 6.4 million users by 2011. One of the major sources of possible growth lies in new technology such as FTTH VoIP, which relies of fiber projects being implemented by Verizon and AT&T, looking to replace old copper wiring systems.

Comcast was not the only cable company to see growth in 2006 either. Time Warner managed to increase their subscription base by 750,000 to 1.86 million customers and Cablevision now has 1.2 million subscribers to their VoIP service.

Regardless of the current state of things, the future looks bright for VoIP. Companies will likely learn from current mistakes and start protecting their investments a little more carefully, bundling their services and overcoming the current spat between so many companies and patent issues. Regardless of what they project, VoIP will likely outdistance itself as the technology slowly begins to settle, very similarly to how the internet’s growing pains in the late 1990s finally smoothed out and produced today’s Search and Social Networking giants.

Here’s our round-up of the weeks best VoIP posts…?

Russell Shaw talks about the pains of trying to cancel your Vonage subscription. Tom Keating reviews the iSoftPhone VoIP App for the iPhone, and Rich Tehrani ponders the ability to run Skype on your iPhone… in a round-about way.

We all know that the future of phone service is most likely in VOIP. It’s cheaper, more viable, and eventually going to offer much higher quality as the technology evolves. For now though, the industry is in something of a transition and the questions still remain; what does the immediate future hold for VOIP service and what does it need to truly take over?

Already, businesses are making the massive jump and dumping their traditional phone service in favor of VOIP. With unlimited bandwidth options and much lower premiums on service, broadband is a much better means to make calls for corporate locations than traditional circuit-based phone access, which is incredibly expensive.

So, as is often the case, the first real jump in technology takes place in the workplace. To see where VOIP will really be in five years, it’s only necessary to look at where it is right now with businesses. Even now, the total revenue between 2002 and 2007 for VOIP companies has grown from $13 billion to $200 billion.

VoIP Gateways
VoIP Gateways will continue to improve as the years pass. It’s been a while since they were simple PC-based platforms. They are now becoming fully embedded systems running on dedicated servers and able to handle much more traffic in small spaces.

This also makes it possible to run everything through IP without worrying about the infrastructure a company has installed. So, with companies able to run everything in their building through a single IP setup, the gateways are going to become more stable and high capacity, which will eventually spill over to the consumer market.

Other Areas of IP based Transfers; Fax and Video Conferencing
VoIP is not the only growth area that companies are looking in for. Because of the desire of companies to move almost every aspect of their business to IP based applications, the infrastructure for those activities will continue to grow. Fax protocols are already making the move and Video Conferencing is soon to follow, something that is already supported by most PC based VOIP applications. Not only will video conferencing become more popular though, it will likely become a standard application as the technology grows to support high quality, real-time video over IP in conjunction with VoIP.

Expanding Services & Lower Cost
It’s already starting to happen, but soon enough, high quality VoIP phones will be available for much cheaper with many more features. It’s not long before multiple colors and touch screen displays (already present in the iPhone and Nokia’s newest E-Series phone) are standard features.

Not only will equipment get cheaper, so too will the service. As it is now, competition already has the cost of VoIP service plunging to new lows, much lower than standard phone service. However, with that much competition, the future also holds a lot of companies collapsing and consolidating. Looking at the state of the phone companies today, it’s realistic that no more than a half dozen or so companies will survive the current generation’s explosion of options. What that means is, if you stick with a lower quality service now, they might now be around for very much longer.

The Immediate Future
So, with growth ranging from 15% to 45% a year right now, it’s going to be less than a decade before VoIP becomes the preeminent means of communication in the country and that means that the technology will start leapfrogging to keep up. Businesses will begin to make the mass-exodus soon to VoIP service, something they’ve started but haven’t been able to complete due to a lack of infrastructure.

And at any time, it’s possible that the traditional phone companies will realize what’s happening and jump into the fray as well. There are a dozen major companies out there and only two or three are even starting to offer VoIP options in any way and some companies like AT&T are going out of their way to block it on their mobile services. So, in the coming years look for any of the major telecom giants to jump into the fray and break apart the current structure.

With dozens of companies releasing dozens of new software modules seemingly every week, it’s always nice to hear when one of the truly decent programs gets a full upgrade. This last week, Truphone released Truphone 3.0 and with it, their first full support of mobile VoIP Software. This new version comes chock full of new features including free mobile calls between all Truphone users and fairly inexpensive calls to everyone else.

It’s also possible now to use SMS over IP, something that furthers the viability of Mobile VoIP in comparison to cell phones. The service itself works right now only with Nokia’s N80 and N95 as well as their E-Series phones, though you can probably expect expanded support in the months to come.

The service is still considered to be in Beta, but with the expansion and inclusion of so many new features, it’s a viable option for anyone with one of Nokia’s new smart phones. The calling feature is fairly inexpensive for those with a means of connecting to data networks and the SMS option is free between other Truphone users and about .15 cents per message to anyone else.

Probably the best feature though is the ability to know when you’re paying for a call and when it’s free, something most companies would cringe at. It will go a long way in keeping phone bills to a minimum and not discovering much too late that that late night call to your girlfriend was actually a billed call. The service also offers a kind of “smart log on” which will automatically seek out and connect to local Wi-Fi access points. When those access points are not available, it’s still possible to access the service over 3G, though the appropriate fees that your cellular service charges will still apply.

What does all of this fancy new software mean for everyone else though? It’s a good picture into the future as to what Mobile VoIP service can and will offer in the coming months. Everyone has been asking what kind of features and quality of service we can expect from Mobile VoIP in the future and the newest version of Truphone is starting to show us exactly what that will be.

Basically, the main problem still remaining is the access points and the cost of Data use over 3G. With newer services constantly offering better features, soon smart phones with the right software will likely be offering better service and call quality over VoIP than what Cell service offers.