NEW YORK.- SunRocket, one of the largest start-up companies offering Internet phone service, has ceased operation and is moving its customers to other companies, according to a person briefed on its status.
A message on SunRocket’s customer service line said Monday that the company was «no longer taking customer service or sales calls.»
Executives of SunRocket, which had 200,000 subscribers as of April, could not be reached for comment Monday.
The development underlined the struggles of start-ups trying to make a business out of providing Internet-based phone service, analysts said.
The companies face enormous pressure from the biggest competitors in the industry – cable companies 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 packages with television and Internet access.
Start-ups like SunRocket and Vonage, the largest and best known of the group, tend to offer only phone services, 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, Richard Greenfield of Pali Research, said. «They only have one product and they can’t control quality,» Greenfield said, adding that the business is «extremely challenging.»
According to estimates from TeleGeography Research, SunRocket was 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 had offered customers a year of unlimited calling in the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico for $199.
Alan Bezoza of the brokerage firm Oppenheimer, said Vonage continued to add subscribers, but the cost of attracting them was resulting in heavy losses. He said that in the first quarter of 2007, Vonage added 166,000 customers but had a loss of $73 million. The start-ups «are going up against the marketing muscle of very large companies,» Bezoza said.
He said he thought that stand-alone Internet telephone companies could wind up as successful niche players in the market.
Fuente: International Herald Tribune
