Amongst all the burning wrecks of the voice over IP startup scene, is it possible that a $40 device hawked on late-night TV may be emerging as one of the biggest VoIP success stories ever? If you believe founder Dan Borislow, that is what is happening with his idea called MagicJack, a simple USB-based VoIP device that Borislow claims will generate $100 million in revenue this year, a market momentum that may spark an initial public offering to help fund his ambitious expansion plans. Continue »
We’re no rating agency here at GigaOM, but Om and I got together this week to figure out our coverage priorities for the coming months — let’s call it a spring cleaning — and decided there are five companies that we’re just not going to spend a lot of time on anymore. Nortel , AMD, Motorola, Vonage and Alcatel-Lucent are getting the boot.
We’re making room for five companies that we think deserve a little more attention and/or deeper scrutiny: Qualcomm, MetroPCS, Huawei, Juniper Networks and Clearwire. All but Huawei are public companies, but Huawei is big enough to matter. This isn’t to say there aren’t tens of other companies we plan to cover closely, but since we’ve essentially upgraded a few and downgraded these others, we figured you guys might care to know what we’re thinking. If not, just skip our rationale below: Continue »
Update: If shabby treatment of its customers and draconian policies are any indication, then Comcast has been behaving like a plain-old phone company for a long time. I say that because the company emailed us today to let us know that it’s now the third-largest residential phone company in the U.S., ahead of Qwest. While not as innovative as, say, Cablevision, I see Comcast as a fast follower with the ability to sell me-too products in volume. The Philadelphia-based cable operator offers “Digital Voice” IP-based phone service in 39 states to 6.47 million customers.
I’m surprised that it’s managed to sign up so many customers, considering that its packages are anything but cheap. Comcast is not the only one selling a lot of voice connections — other cable operators such as Time Warner Cable are doing well and putting the hurt on traditional phone companies. The rising fortune of cable companies’ voice business is in sharp contrast to dedicated VoIP service providers like Vonage, which has been struggling to keep its early momentum. (Related Posts: Who killed the VoIP revolution? and Is Cable VoIP getting a sore throat?)
Update: * Qwest says it has 7.8 million lines, and as a result Comcast’s claim may not be quite right, though we wonder if Q is including its enterprise customers in the total to bolster its claim. We checked with them, and as expected, these include 1.3 million small business users and 6.5 million residential users. From that perspective, Comcast did make a legit claim.
Five years after it launched Voicewing by rebranding DeltaThree, Verizon is shutting down the VoIP service that never managed to get any traction. It was launched to compete with Vonage. AT&T stopped signing up new customers for CallVantage, another Vonage competitor, in 2008. Voicewing will be shut down on March 31, and will most likely be replaced by FiOS Digital Voice, a new offering. The decision will almost certainly push DeltaThree over the edge — the company has been running out of cash and has already been delisted from Nasdaq.
For the past few days, the VoIP community has been indulging in a bit of soul-searching. The debate: Is VoIP dead? To pragmatists such as Alec Saunders, the answer is yes. In his well-reasoned polemic, “2008: The Year VoIP Died,” he succinctly writes, “Voice over IP is just a transport and signaling technology. It’s plumbing.” Harsh, but true!
Of course, on the other side of the debate are folks such as Jeff Pulver and Jon Arnold, both with deep interests in the success of VoIP, who seem to think that VoIP is in for a renaissance. Pulver argues that we are going through Internet Communications Continuum, or “the continued evolution of the IP Communications Industry. In my case, this continuum represents all forms of IP Communications, including: VoIP, Instant Messaging, Presence, IP Signaling, Internet TV, Unified Communications, Social Media and more.”
They continue to think of VoIP as a revolution. The reality, however, is more mundane and as Alec said, boring. Where do we come out on this debate? On the side of realism. About two months ago, Ian Bell on our behalf analyzed the state of VoIP and why it was “dead.” We were egged on by some comments made by Skype’s general manager of voice and video, Jonathan Christensen, at an industry conference a few weeks ago.
A study by Keynote Systems shows that AT&T voice is most reliable while Comcast digital has the best quality. Other independent VoIP providers are pretty average on both counts it seems. Continue »
I received an emailed press release from Comcast this morning about their plans to work with Vonage to address “the reasonable network management of Internet services” that left me a tad confused. Comcast had already admitted to massaging P2P traffic, sparking an online uproar that resulted in the company backing down and announcing plans to use different kinds of network management techniques. (They massaged P2P traffic by either delaying or blocking P2P packets outright, which caused BitTorrent-type services to degrade.)
In an attempt to uncover the real reason behind the release, I called a Comcast spokeswoman and asked her if this was an exclusive deal with Vonage, and if any money was changing hands. She said that the agreement doesn’t preclude others from working with Comcast, that in fact it’s working with a variety of companies and groups. And no, there is no money changing hands.
Still, the press release kept nagging at me. Continue »
Updated: AT&T has stopped selling AT&T Callvantage to new customers, reports DSL Reports.
AT&T, long before it merged with SBC had made a half-hearted attempt at getting into consumer VoIP by selling a service called, CallVantage. It was surprisingly good, especially its call quality. Unfortunately, the company never quite made the commitment to it. And when SBC merger happened, well it fell victim of save-your-mentality that comes with it. Today, there is word that AT&T has stopped pushing the service through its affiliate channels – a sure sign that the company is backing away even further and would shut it down soon enough. Some believe that shut down is going to come next year, though I thought it was already killed, since the former AT&T Callvantage boss is now running AT&T’s CDN business, and we have not heard a single pitch from the company in over a year. I guess this is one less thing Vonage has to worry about!
Despite all the troubles with VoIP service providers such as SunRocket and Vonage, VoIP as a technology seems to be doing quite well in the U.S., according to data from Telegeography. As of the end of March, there were 16.3 million consumer VoIP lines, or about 13.8 percent of U.S. households, and 27 percent of households with broadband lines installed.
It’s hardly a surprise, as a lot new additions are coming from people buying triple-play services from cable companies. As of the end of the first quarter of 2008, here’s how the cable VoIP data broke down:
After a really rough 2007, Vonage (VG), the independent voice-over-IP service provider, seems to be having a better 2008. This morning the company reported its first-quarter 2008 financial results, and well, things are not bad. Not spectacular, but not bad, either.
More importantly, the company announced plans to sell Covad DSL services, rebranded as Vonage Broadband and tightly coupled with its VoIP service. Continue »
