wierdo
join:2001-02-16
Tulsa, OK
 ·Future Nine Corpor..
·Teliax VOIP
 ·Cox HSI
| reply to fiberguy
Re: Evolution of the VoIP market?
said by fiberguy  :It amazes me how people love their VoIP service at $24 a month or $199 for two years. They love to save all this money and claim that other VoIP and POTS services are too expensive (usually $15 more a month)... However, they remain shocked or angered when their companies are starting to fold. This should be a lesson to people that phone service just can't be sold for $24 a month or less. Enjoy the savings now and just be ready to come back to the real world of telephone service. This is what a savings of $15 gets people... no dial tome. Nah..reliable phone service can be sold for less than $24 a month (one CLEC around here does $19.99 a month, and that's paying SBC's UNE charge), but $8 a month is not sustainable, at least not without a market much larger than currently exists.
That's the problem. Not the price, but the market. $8 a month isn't selling at a loss, it's just not paying for overhead when you only have 200,000 customers. The hardware and origination/termination fees can probably be covered for most users for that price. Only the extremely high volume customers would cause a net operating loss.
When you throw in marketing, sales, and administration, it gets dicey at that price. I think $15 a month is a lot more sustainable, but again, isn't enough to pay the overhead without a fairly large customer base.
A large customer base also allows for better pricing with the providers that most of these companies rely on. While I can go out and get a pretty good deal from the likes of VoicePulse Connect, Voxee, or any other bottom dollar termination provider, that's still more than triple what Cingular was paying WilTel to terminate their long distance several years ago. If you don't mind contracting for a few million minutes a month, they don't mind having incredibly thin margins on the per minute price. 
There are a lot of companies out there who don't cater mainly to the uneducated consumer. Those are the companies that I expect to stick around. |
mammasix
Premium
join:2004-01-10
Frederick, MD
·Vonics VOIP
·Comcast
| I have a stripped down landline for my security system...guess how much this little piece of technology costs me? 25 per month. I can only get calls in, any calls out are charged per call.
On the other hand I have a VoIP line that costs me 19 a month and I have unlimited calling and full features.
I don't know where you guys live, but in MD, Verizon is a parasite. Before VoIP, we were paying around 80 per month for phone service. |
