Internet Phone Start-up Goes Belly-Up 184
westlake writes "The New York Times has a short piece on the failure of SunRocket, the second-largest internet phone service after Vonage, with 200,000 customers. Start-ups like SunRocket are under enormous pressure from the telcos and cable, which have marketing muscle and can bundle VoIP with Internet, TV, home security services, and so on. The start-up has only one product, and since they don't own the lines, they can't control the quality of service. Attracting subscribers can put a start-up deep into the red. Vonage added 166,000 subscribers in the first quarter of 2007, but lost $77 million."
Impossible (Score:1)
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A note on that PAP2: it's locked to Vonage. There's a good chance that you can unlock it (bargainshare forums have instructions) but do NOT, under any circumstances, connect it to your network when you have a live internet connection. If you do so the device will update itself to the latest firmware and you will not be able to unlock it. The unlocking method works on the assumption that your existing unit will try to upgrade. Since you have an older unit, it
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I'll believe it... (Score:3, Funny)
Till then, SunRocket VoIP is alive an well
I've always wondered (Score:2)
Probably going to Vonage? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't worry about Vonage so much. They have 2.4 million subscribers already. Plus, it's not as if the cable company or telcos offering VOIP service have that much more control over the quality of their service either. They're still stuck with the same problems everyone else is in regard to Internet traffic.
For not having control over their traffic, I've been using Vonage for almost 3 years now over Comcast in Michigan and now Bright House Networks' Road Runner service in the Tampa Bay area and I have to say, the quality of service has never sucked so long as my Internet connection is working right.
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I'd call for boycott against Verizon and AT&T, but all those people who just signed up for a 2-year contract when they bought their iPhone
Re:Probably going to Vonage? (Score:5, Informative)
Look at T-Mobile's HotSpot @ Home service. It's basically GSM over IP (voice, data, SMS, etc), with the added advantage that you can do seemless handoffs between IP and GSM, i.e: start a call at home, walk out the door and it switches to GSM. I'm loving it. $39.99 for 1,000 cellular minutes (with nights & weekends), + $9.99 for the HotSpot add-on. I basically have unlimited calls. Plus I can use wi-fi in any area where there isn't a good GSM signal.
T-Mobile doesn't have landline business in the United States so they don't have any reason to undercut their own offerings to keep a dying landline industry alive. And the best part is not giving your money to AT&T or Verizon.
Re:Probably going to Vonage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does it automatically pick up any open hotspot, or do they have to be pre-configured?
Re:Probably going to Vonage? (Score:5, Informative)
It won't automatically connect to an open one unless you add it to the list of saved networks. You can use any open hotspot with a DHCP server though.
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Does it come with a get-out-of-jail free card?
Overzealous cops won't know you're using the coffee shop wifi. Laptops are obvious, phones aren't. Also, since T-Mobile seamlessly hands off the call to cellular when the wifi signal dries up AND bills for the call based on place of origin, you only need the wifi to initiate the call. Walk/drive away and the call continues to incur 0 added costs.
Regardless, $40, let alone $50, is more than I pay for my home and cellular phones combined anyway.
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Who said anything about VoIP? In many nations cellular users outnumber landline users. VoIP won't kill the landline industry (though it won't help it). Wireless will.
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PS: We had a form of net neutrality and EMAIL packets where downgraded vs. HTTP.
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Ie. The building where I live is paying an ISP for an ADSL connection and 16 IP-addresses.
We use http://www.adsl-optimizer.dk/ [adsl-optimizer.dk] for QoS and it works very well.
But we would love to be able to tell the ISP to eg. prioritize incoming packages from the ISP to four of our IP-adresses.
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However, with net neutrality, they wouldn't be able to give priority to any VOIP packets, including their own.
No. Net Neutrality is about setting QoS rules based on endpoints, not on content. You are allowed to set low latency rules for packets that you detect as VoIP, but you are not allowed to just set these rules for packets that are destined for your VoIP to POTS gateway, or for endpoints off your network that pay you extra money.
However, I think that such a system would be abused, with many users tagging everything as VOIP, or whatever gets them the highest QOS.
You're treating QoS as a one-dimensional thing, while in fact it is three dimensional (maybe more I've forgotten). The dimensions are:
Re:Probably going to Vonage? (Score:4, Informative)
They aren't stuck with any of the same problems if the traffic never leaves their own network. The cable outfit's VoIP packets may never leave the cable network itself, if they designed it so the VoIP->PSTN switch-over happens before their network edge. Ditto for the telcos. And quite a few of the telcos (Verizon and AT&T come to mind) are Tier 1 providers in their own right -- and could easily have end-to-end QoS for their own VoIP traffic.
Note: I'm not defending them or advocating for their service over Vonage or anybody else. Just pointing out the obvious. And for what it's worth, using T-Mo's @Home service (which isn't strictly VoIP, it's closer to GSM over IP), I haven't had any problems with my internet connection.
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Actually, according to TFA, it was $73 million, but what's $4 million between friends? ;)
And the answer is obviously "no." But, the real question is will the company continuously sustain losses in the millions? And the answer again, is "no." That's because the ratio of their net losses to total revenue dropped last year. It was 0.89 in
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That's the issue, now isn't it? My Verizon DSL connection slows to a crawl from time to time, and drops me completely several times a week. I can download huge files -- Slackware CDs, VMs, etc. And I can surf the net. But I can't hold an Internet Radio connection open for more than an hour or two. Rebooting the DSL modem is a regular occurence around here. My son's Comcast connection in Se
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Not really.
1) Many of those people are essentially providing "last mile" service and not much more (easier to control), probably one reason they're so much more expensive.
2) Many of the big cable
Re:Probably going to Vonage? (Score:4, Interesting)
I had a three day - THREE DAY - outage at my house, which took out my internet, TV, you name it. Therefore, since I'm a SunRocket customer (:'(), that took out my phone, too. Even better: my house is in a nice little recessed valley, which doesn't get good cell reception. Therefore, to call tech support, I would have to walk up the road about a quarter mile, and get one bar worth of reception.
For a day and a half, this was the conversation:
"Hello, yes, we're completely out here..."
"OK! What exactly is out?"
"My internet is out"
"OK..."
"And my Cable is out"
"OK..."
*talk a little longer. She asks for a phone number; I give her my cell, and instructions to leave a message if they get my VM, since I'm out of reception range*
"Do you have a home phone number?"
"Yes, but it's out too, thanks to the internet being out"
"Do you have our Voice Over IP service?"
"No, I use SunRocket"
"Well, we don't do support for SunRocket, you will need to contact their tech support"
"No, lady, I know you don't support SunRocket, but my internet and cable are out!"
"You will need to contact SunRocket support"
"No, this has nothing to do with Su--"
"Thank you for calling Comcast! *CLICK*"
After many call-backs and attempts to get her and the next three techs fired, I FINALLY - after three days - got someone out to the house, who explained why everything died: We were the victims of the most amateur attempt at stealing cable ever. It was laughable; shredded cable where he tried to put the connector on, cut wire everywhere, he eventually had the cable un-sheathed, and tied in together in a knot.
But it took three days to get a tech, partly because it was a weekend, and partly because of SunRocket, and them absolutely refusing to help me because I DARED to have an internet service that Comcast didn't expressly approve.
If anything did in my VoIP provider, it was this bullshit. And that leaves me with very unattractive options: Go to Vonage (who have their own problems), go back to AT+T land line, or go with Comcast's VoIP (a company who I'd dump completely if I had that option).
Re:Probably going to Vonage? (Score:4, Insightful)
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As soon as a Level 1 hears the name of another company, your call is terminated.
Short term selfish gains (Score:2)
And that's why they say nobody on their networks uses Linux, so it's not worth supporting.
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Cheers.
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Otherwise, I'd have been all over it. But thanks to that, I didn't get that mental block out o
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My policy for voip on our network: you can use it, it is not aga
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This begs the question..... (Score:2)
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I've never had an issue with cell call quality. Perhaps that's because I live in a suburban/rural area and they don't have to resort to tricks like slashing the codec down to squeeze more people onto limited spectrum. My cell sounds just as good as any landline or VoIP phone that I've ever used.
Where are you that you can detect a noticeable difference when using a cell phone? What provider are you using?
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What struck me were the numbers, which do not impress: Vonage at $2.95 a share. Penny stock territory. SunRocket No. 2 in VoIP with 200,000 subscribers.
From The-Handwriting-Is-On-The-Wall Department:
Internet phone service provider SunRocket Inc. fired a significant number of employees and several top executives on June 29.
The layoffs included Chief Technology Officer Mark Fedor and Chief Information Officer Robert Kramer. CFO David Sa
SunRocket (Score:2, Funny)
1. Don't let a 3-year-old name your company
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Obligatory Simpsons reference:
Skinner: Poland, tell us about your nation's achievements.
Milhouse: Well, uh, I heard they sent a rocket to the sun once... at night! And there was that submarine, with the screen doors...
Skinner: No, no, no, no, no. Young man, you need to do some serious boning!
Anyone remember Dialpad? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Anyone remember Dialpad? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Now he's one of the hardest working men in podcasts / radio. Check out http://www.twit.tv/ [www.twit.tv] (i.e. This Week In Tech) - his podcast empire. Leo helps make my daily commute tolerable.
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The only woman on that network with ANY dignity is Blair Butler. All the rest are just illustrations of what happens when you combine breast augmentation with anorexia. Most of t
What can they do though? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, make all the features free. Call waiting, call answer, call forwarding, call filtering, and whatever other features you can think up. Telcos charge a lot of money for these extras. By making them free (including them in the monthly rate), you're offering customers a big incentive switch from the other guys. And since most of these features cost very little once they are initially developed, it's a wonder why you would even want to charge for them.
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-The quality of service is dependent on the cable provider being consistent.
-Even if the provider is good, there is no prioritizing for VOIP on the cable modem, which is a huge advantage for cable companies who want to do their own VOIP. Some will even give a little bit more upstream for VOIP users.
-Some providers use their own routers (like Vonage). A lot depend on ethernet adapters. Routers that are not configured properly or are overloaded/old (and cannot handle the tr
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First of all, good for you for throwing some ideas out. What most people fail to understand is the VOIP protocol is **loaded** with features. The clients (and vonage) simply haven't caught up in most cases.
Second, the whole notion that a voip provider doesn't "own the lines" is a joke. Yes, somewhere lots of telco promoters are using this crazy idea to inject FUD into the notion that consumers c
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That my friend is the nature of the beast when it comes to voip. While the goal of a 1:1 translation of POTS service/quality is commendable, most consumers will gladly exchange lower quality calls for some combination of lower prices and more service.
Comparing Slashdot to VOIP is a really bad comparison because one requires very low lag times, while the other could care less.
No. The disconnect for you may be that you have experie
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You mention "without cooperation from the routers along the way (i.e. make them have VoIP packets "jump the queue" when there's a lot of traffic to process)" - which is really QOS - but QOS only comes into play when you don't have enough bandwidth to begin with to support all the traffic you're trying to pipe down the line. If you had enou
Problems are usually CAUSED by telcos. (Score:4, Insightful)
I end up calling broadvoice letting them know and they have to jump through hoops to get Verizon to quit acting like a 3 year old and put the routing info back in. This happens twice yearly. I also hear of it happening elsewhere as well with providers other than Broadvoice.
Telcos are scared to death of Voip. It sounds way better than cellphones so the current generation see it as great. They also see the $13.95 a month compared to the $49.95 a month from a telco and it's a no brainer. (Yes My VoIP line costs $13.95 a month. Yes Verizon charges $50.00 a month for a basic, every call costs you $0.03 + long distance charges phone line.)
So the telcos screw with the Voip providers, "accidentally".
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It sounds way better than cellphones so the current generation see it as great
That part I've never understood. My cellphone works just about everywhere. If you are a big talker and can shift some of your calling to nights & weekends (easy to do when all of your friends have cell phones too) then it often winds up costing you $0.015 - $0.03/minute to use a cell phone to make all your calls. Toss in the fact that you can use it just about anywhere and you aren't fighting your neighbors torrent of the Sopranos for bandwidth and I don't see what advantage there is to VoIP.
T-Mo
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I'm sure they can, but there isn't a published standard for it as far as I'm aware, so they'd be building it from scratch. UMA/GMA [wikipedia.org] has been around for awhile.
AT&T could implement a UMA network pretty easily but I doubt they will, as it would undercut their landline business.
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You might want to have a phone that's able to transmit a CDMA signal and *also* an 802.11 signal, so you could connect to cell networks and LANs with the same device. If your network were coordinated well enough such that you could transfer calls between VOIP and the cellular network, that would be a big step, and seems to be what the grandparent was talking about.
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Some of u
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Telco's aren't "scared to death of VoIP". They're using it, in the back-end of the networks, probably where it really belongs. In controlled environments. The number of people using VoIP for home service isn't significantly changing their backbone traffic, which someone pays them for, eit
Losing money (Score:2)
I'm not surprised - Vonage gave me $200 to sign up (CC Giftcard)for a year at $14.95/month; netting them $80 (assuming they paid full price for the CC card and don't kickback anything to CC for the signup)for the year. I was nice, I didn't take their free PAP I simply canceled my existing Vonage service and activated the new number on my existing PAP. Strange w
Turnover? (Score:3, Interesting)
The turnover rate for Vonage is very high from what I've read. Is that added subscriber number on top of their pre-existing user base or is it just what they added in the first quarter? They could be hemorrhaging faster than they can bring in.
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Ah well (Score:2)
"You tried your best, and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try."
Same thing happened to many indie DSL (Score:2)
If you didn't get your DSL through Ameritech, (the only game in town around here,) you were pretty much guaranteed that your DSL service would be down at least 2 weeks straight every other billing period. Nothing your ISP could do about it except stall, hoping Ameritech would fix "the lines." At the very least, I think Ameritech was sandbagging, at worst, and I believe the worst, Ameritech was deliberately shutting off servic
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no more voice mail (Score:5, Informative)
"Sunrocket! The no Gotcha phone company!
Well I am out 2.5 months service, I guess they learned how to "get" me.
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But my service plan got renewed in MAY so I'm out 10 months of service!!! That makes my monthly cost 600/26 instead of 600/36 = $23 instead of $17.
Oh well, they were still a great deal while they were around. I loved the international calling rates.
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What's advertised and what you get are RARELY the same in the tech "sector".
People dedicate whole jobs to reviewing products and usually rate companies that produce products that match their advertising, fairly high.
Software/computers are probably one of the worst examples of "you don't get what you were told it would do."
What's the big deal? It's just naievete to think that a $14/month phone service would survive.
Crap! (Score:2)
Procrastination pays off. (Score:5, Funny)
Moral of the story: Procrastination pays off.
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CallVantage is from Lucifer Himself (Score:3, Interesting)
It is SHIT.
The voice quality is average at best. The reliability is horrendous. At any time and for any reason the entire service drops out - nothing no dialtone, nothing. Inbound calls route straight to voicemail about 50% of the time.
AT&T's tech 'support' is very simple - they tell you the only thing to do is to install he TA in front of the router behind the cable modem. But the Centillium MTA-1 is a locked down box and it's configured as a NAT device so it fucks up my Homelan every time someone looks for a DHCP refresh. So I have to put it behind the router instead and because of that tech 'support' won't 'support' it. It also consumes a great deal of bandwidth - about 128k. That's a LOT for quality that isn't crystal fucking clear. That's the same as two ISDN channels and for that much bandwidth I should be able to hear you sleeping on the other end.
Phone companies will kill VoIP just like they have killed everything else. They'll crush all comers and then do what they do best. Fuck up the service and rape the customers.
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I have (had) Sunrocket :-( (Score:2)
I guess now we all gotta figure out what to switch to... apparently http://www.viatalk.com/ [viatalk.com] offers to take on any Sunrocket customers at $200/year.
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I'm also very upset about SunRocket's demise particularly considering that I moved over from Vonage after a disappointing experience with their quality of service (and yes, it was their service not my ISP because I had no other cable problems) and the quality of their customer (dis)service.
Looking at ViaTalk I'm glad to see that coverage is available in my area and that it's list of included features is longer even than both Vonage and SunRocket put together! ViaTalk looks very promising indeed and if S
Marketing Failure? (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps lack of visibility was part of their problem...?
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I have Sunrocket service, and it's actually thanks to Slashdot--this was the first place I had heard of them (someone here got a referral bonus from me). Now that I've had the service for a year and half, I've seen them advertising on various websites, but they've never done TV advertising like Vonage. I'm not sure that Vonage has the best plan either though, because they're spending so much money on advertising that they lost $77M last quarter desp
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They must have had some real dolts in Marketing... that or never had enough budget to really make a go of it, anyway.
Hey some people got some crappy phone service at lower-than-sustainable prices for a little while. Isn't that what everyone was screaming for when Judge Green broke up the Bell System?
You GOT it, America. Congratulations! Competition means that some companies DO NOT SURVIVE, especially if they don't have a sustainable busin
Thoughts from a former SunRocket employee (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically, there's not one bigreason SunRocket went under, but rather a few smaller reasons that added up. The main one being that there was too much focus on bringing in management from the outside (mostly from AOL) instead of promoting from within. Also, employee retention was a big problem. When you start seeing early employees of the company quitting or getting fired, it's very demoralizing to those still there.
I ended up leaving after I was involuntarily transferred to another department (which was supposed to be temporary, but my requests to go back to my previous department were ignored), I had a director-level non-techie jerk that had been hired from outside SunRocket placed as my immediate supervisor, and they decided to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on network monitoring software when we in the process of doing the same thing with Nagios [nagios.org] and/or OpenNMS [opennms.org] & saved big money.
To all of the former customers of SunRocket, as well as anyone considering hiring a former SunRocket employee: just about all of the non-management folks (especially the support personnel based in the US, & the technical groups) were the most competent group of people I have ever worked with, and the majority of them did care about providing the best VOIP service possible.
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When a company is looking for the next round of VC funding
So what you, someone who is working on the floor, might have interpreted as a rush to hire outside management from a big company - might actually have been a play to make the company more 'fundable' in a VC's eyes.
Additionally, as much as its great to think
Residential VoIP is a non starter (Score:2)
the SnR on my Qwest DSL line varies enough that i'll go days at a time with line-retrains every 3 minutes due to "crc_error threshhold exceeded". Years ago, I ditched the ISP supplied product ( an ActionTec 1524, which tended to hard-lock every 36 hours, and didn't support basic features like _port forwarding_ properly ) and got a cisco 678 off of ebay. I've called before and the gist is somewhere between "we're not seeing any problems here" and "it must be o
Where was the notice? (Score:2)
Today, we found out that the service was down because the company was dead. We didn't find out from anyone at SunRocket, we found out on Slashdot. On SLASHDOT! And so far, no luck in contacting support about "Hey fuckers, we just paid you, how about a fucking refund!?".
I think we got gipped.
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Of course, Packet8 or other, less technical solutions are available.
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Are you having any trouble with dropped calls on their termination? I've been seeing some of that lately, but debugging is a hard problem, between firewalls, ISP's, providers, etc.
Here's an IAX2 tutorial [bfccomputing.com] for les.net I did, in case anybody needs it.
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I use Linux 2.6.18 with SIP iptables module to forward all traffic to internal Asterisk gateway. I'll have to upgrade to Asterisk 1.4.x sometime soon so I can finally take advantage of the SIP jitter buffer. (Jitter is not really a big problem for myself)
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Re:refund? (Score:4, Interesting)
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you stand in line with the other 200,000 paid-up subscribers and kiss your money goodbye.
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Even though most contracts say 60 days for a dispute, most credit card companies will extend that in a case like this, and a merchant (or the merchant account provider) is liable for 12 months or more for chargebacks.