The ViOP bandwagon is getting fairly full. After early service like Ebay’s Skype and Vonage signed on millions of customers, the cable companies (especially Comcast and Time Warner) found the ViOP was a good way to steal customers from their telecom competitors. It has worked so well that 5.1 million of the US VoIP subscribers as measured at the end of September took their service from cable providers. The total number of US customers rose to 8.2 million, up from 3.5 million a year ago.One of the complaints about VoIP, especially early versions, is the customers needed a PC or special adapters to make the service work. The experience was different from simply picking up a telephone and dialing. Other knocks against VoIP is the it had no 911 service. That is changing. Of course, if electricity is off, VoIP doesn’t work either. They are still working on that one.Thomson, the big French electronics firm, is beginning to offer a new VoIP handset, made by GE. (One has to wonder why GE does not market the product on its own.)Thomson’s product will be sold to subsribers of SunRocket, a US VoIP service with 170,000 subscribers. The new device can simply plug into a high-speed internet line and it works as a normal phone would. If you have SunRocket service. Companies like Uniden already have similar products.Why Thomson would market a phone exclusively with one of the smaller VoIP companies is puzzling. The firm is locking itself out of over 95% of the US market.Thomson may be dumb, but VoIP is gaining ground like a house on fire, and that will continue.Douglas A. McIntyre can be reached at [email protected]. He does not own securities in companies that he writes about.
VoIP Comes Of Age (VG)(CMCSA)(TMS)(TWX)(EBAY)
Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.
McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.
His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.
A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.
TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.
McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.
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