Between the closing lines Om’s post and Pulver’s prediction for 2005 the prospects for many of the upstart VoIP players is looking somewhat murky.
I say that because the MSO’s, the RBOCs and the long running incumbents like AT&T, Sprint and MCI all have enourmous customer bases to convrt over to VoIP, while the newcomers have to battle to first achieve mindshare, let alone market share.
While the companies like BroadVoice, VoicePulse and Packet 8 all can run lean and mean to keep their doors open and customers happy, the big boys can leverage existing marketing assets and their already signed up customers.
The axiom of “it’s easier and cheaper to keep a customer than to get a new one” is not something to be taken lightly. For the cable operators moving into VoIP the lessons being learned from CableVision regarding consumer adoption to VoIP (now > 250,000 customers) it clearly means that having the customers already being served by a company makes it easier to migrate them to a new technology.
It will be very difficult for upstarts to survive if they only offer cheap VoIP
The way to survive is to offer services that people will pay for rather than vanilla VoIP which will become …