Source: voipcentral.org

Packet8, the third residential VoIP service provider in USA is offering its services to some 12,000 customers of an unknown company. I guess it would be similar arrangement as it did for the former SunRocket customers. Here the question comes, who is latest VoIP player closing down its operation?

At any case, it is not Vonage, although the residential player is down with patent controversies in recent months. The latest patent defeat is from Sprint Nextel. The court has ordered Vonage to pay $69.5 million fine for infringing Sprint VoIP patents.

Just two months ago, SunRocket closed down their operation despite claiming sizable residential customers. Read our coverage on SunRoket downfall.

Packet8 is the third residential VoIP player in USA behind Vonage and SunRocket with nearly 181,000 customers. The company has earlier reached out an agreement with SunRocket to provide VoIP services to the stranded SunRocketers.

Source: voipcentral.org

Free VoIP calls are not free in a strict sense. The customers are charged directly or indirectly. First of all, they need to bear the hardware costs. If not, the membership fees which may be very inexpensive.

Viewed so, it would be more appropriate to discuss Oomas free offer. The Palo Alto, California-based startup has just extended call-routing devices dubbed as Ooma Hub and Ooma Scout devices using which the customers can enjoy unlimited free calls anywhere in the USA.

The introductory price for Ooma Hub is $399 and $39.95 for Ooma Scout. These devices are available from companys website. With this expenditure, the customer can enjoy life-time free VoIP services and other Ooma services such as ooma Instant Second Line and the ooma Broadband Answering Machine.

It seems that Ooma is taking a different approach to lure residential customers. Instead of spending money in marketing and advertisements like Vonage, it simply markets the devices for unlimited home calling.

Mark Sullivan has raised an interesting question regarding the survival of this new startup.

He asks,

So the key questions in Ooma’s future are these: Can it grow its network of local Hubs fast enough to dramatically reduce the connection fees it’s paying to connect calls outside its network? And will mainstream consumers lay down $400 for a piece of hardware and a promise of free calls forever?

He adds,

If the answer to either is no, Ooma might quickly burn through its venture capital and disappear like so many other VoIP upstarts.

Source: voipcentral.org

It may be relief for the customers who got stranded at the untimely death of SunRocket. Packet8 has reached out an agreement with SunRocket to provide VoIP service to the latters customers.

As per the arrangements, the SunRocket customers can smoothly transform their phone numbers to Packet8 and enjoy one month free service under the residential VoIP plan. The customers will not charged up for the change in number.

SunRocket has reportedly agreed to contact its customers through email or voicemail campaign insisting them to transform their numbers to Packet8 immediately.

Packet8 is the third residential VoIP player in USA behind Vonage and SunRocket with nearly 181,000 customers.

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Source: voipcentral.org

I have gone through the findings of In-Stat report on the state of residential VoIP in USA. The report highlights how VoIP is gaining momentum among the residential customers of USA.

According to In-Stat, the USA has signed up nearly 3.8 million residential VoIP customers in the year 2006. It further says that consumer VoIP adoption will push forward wholesale VoIP revenues to $3.8 billion by 2010. The total revenue from residential VoIP was recorded $1.1 billion last year.

In an another report, ABI Research predicted the residential VoIP market will swell from its present customer base of 38 million to touch more than 267 million households in 2012.

The strong growth can be attributed entry of Cable service providers into the VoIP arena. For instance, Comcast, the US-based cable service provider has registered more than 419,000 new voice customers during fourth quarter of 2006 ending the year with 1.9 million voice customers.

Source: voipcentral.org

I have with me the latest In-Stat report, which presents vivid picture of current state of Residential VoIP in the USA. The most interesting aspects of the recent study is the tentatively inclusion of both client-based VoIP services like Skype and Facilities-based VoIP services such as Vonage to find out exact number of household VoIP users.

A new kind of service Residential VoIP Tracker Service introduced by research firm In-Stat confirms there is an increase in the number of residential VoIP customers in the country in the last few months.

According Residential VoIP Tracker Service, now US has more than 9 million active residential VoIP customers. The active VoIP customers are the customers who dont access multiple VoIP services from different service providers.

In percentile terms, 7.9 percent of households now use a VoIP telephony service by the end of Q3 this year. It was 6.5 percent at the end of second quarter.

When it comes to client-based VoIP services, Skype enjoys the supremacy with 2.1 million active households. Microsoft comes next with 1.1 million households as of the end of Q3.

There is a close battle between Vonage and Time Warner Cable in field of facilities-based VoIP services. Vonage leads the USA residential VoIP market with 1.7 million subscribers while Time Warner has 1.6 million active household customers.

Image and Report : In-Stat