Let’s face it, the baby Bell type telcos never really were in love with VoIP.
For those telcos here in North America who tried it, specifically AT&T with the likely soon to be mothballed Call Vantage, Verizon’s extinct VoiceWing and now from Canada the cancelled WebCall service from SaskTel, we’re seeing a pattern. The pattern was quite simply this. VoIP was at best a glorified lab experiment for the telcos as was the case with Verizon which simply cloned Vonage. For AT&T the product was going gang busters until SBC took over the company and stopped all marketing behind CallVantage, which arguably was the best product in its class. Now we see the SaskTel report, and given they announced only 400 users, it shows that the Canadian telcos practice the same kind of marketing that Verizon did.
“Hide and Seek”
Instead of blasting out the benefits far and wide, the telcos have let the cable operators win the battle for consumer VoIP, pretty much conceding the triple play game to the MSO (multiple system operators) by doing so. The cable guys realized quickly that owning the customer via their phone number was the key. The telco folks were too busy thinking mobile and have watched their market share erode in every direction. So, while I’m a fan of FIOS I don’t see that service winning back as many of the departed phone customers that soon.