Slashdot Mirror
Internet Phone Start-up Goes Belly-Up
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."
I am/was a Sunrocket subscriber. Everything was really great, one year and 9 months of everything just working for $200 a year. Right now the phone still works, I can call and be called by people. However, the voice mail is gone both the message box on the website and the ability to leave messages when calling me (it just rings forever). I'm guessing all my old messages are toast too. When calling customer service (800-786-0132) you get a message the last part in an almost robotic voice,
... We are no longer taking customer service or sales calls. Goodbye."
"Sunrocket! The no Gotcha phone company!
Well I am out 2.5 months service, I guess they learned how to "get" me.
I've been a subscriber to Vonage for a few years now. Although I am happy with their service, I don't use the phone that much, so SunRocket's package that was something like $9.99/month for 200 minutes was very attractive to me and for the past couple of months I have been meaning to change my service to them. Every week I keep telling myself, "Ok, this week I will move from Vonage to SunRocket", but the procrastinator in me kept putting it off. Now I'm glad I didn't change.
Moral of the story: Procrastination pays off.
World of Anime
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 and/or OpenNMS & 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.