Lights out for SunRocket

It looks like the sun has finally set for the company that was the second largest U.S. supplier of Internet phone services,. SunRocket silently called it quits without notifying its customers, which total more than 200,000.

Vienna, Virginia-based SunRocket, which is a rival to Vonage Holdings in the home and small business market for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services, gave no warning it was shutting down operations on its Web site.

Callers to its customer service line heard a brief recorded message, saying: "We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls. Goodbye."

Companies offering calls over the Web were seen as rivals to established carriers when they sprouted up a few years ago, but many are having a difficult time financially competing against their big, deep-pocketed and entrenched rivals. Calls and e-mails to SunRocket by Reuters were not returned. A report in the New York Times quoted an unnamed source that had been briefed on the company's status as saying that SunRocket had ceased operation and plans to move its customers to one or more companies. It has been confirmed that those companies are Packet 8 and ViaTalk.

Customers, many of them lured by SunRocket's offer of unlimited phone calling for one year for an upfront fee of $199 within the Canada, the United States and Puerto Rico, reported patchy service or full outages on Monday on Web sites such as FatWallet.com and DSLReports.com.

Who's to say that the companies taking care of SunRocket's "ditched" subscribers won't eventually go under again. What is happening here? Do any VoIP adopters out there believe that these companies are giving VoIP a bad name?

I can't even tell you how many people I have spoken to have said that the cost savings of VoIP isn't enough justification anymore, they would rather pay the extra money and have the peace of mind of reliability. This isn't good, especially for an early adopter and firm believer of VoIP such as myself.

These companies spend too much money on "trendy telecom" advertising that they have forgotten about the technology that provides the reliability and redundancy that is needed to win clients over. For residential VoIP, people just want regular dial-tone and lower costs, hence the high-churn rate if they are not satisfied with the service. Business is a bit different, they see the value proposition and the features that improve their businesses.

People, people, please provide realiable, utility-grade VoIP services, you are ruining it for the rest of us.