Who will be the Breakout Telecom Company in 2006?

Every year we see a lot of new telecom companies coming in to the market to take a piece of the competitive prepaid telecom landscape. While I am 100% for competition the question always arises which one of these new telecom companies will have the right business plan for success?

IP Telephony was the buzz in 2005, the year that saw Vonage as the breakout performer but 2006 looks to be much of the same, except this time it looks to be the year of the Internet Telephony enabler. Vonage managed to single handedly peak everyone's interest in the VoIP arena and now many cable and older telephony operators are rushing to catch up and cash in on the wave.

On the top of my list I see Net2Phone reclaiming their once large dominance in he VoIP world but this time with a mix of huge cable deals and on the backs of their new push back into the softphone market. The only thing that brings a question mark is the potential take over by IDT. If the take over happens it's hard to say what direction the company will go in but if IDT leaves them be I am confident that they will finaly come back to being a household name and seriously making Vonage stop, look and listen.

Other companies to watch for in 2006:

at&t = The new SBC has at lot at stake with their recent acquisition and name change and so far have come out of the gate running!

Radiant = A long time player whose time has come in the prepaid world!

Boost Mobile = With their youth oriented marketing and cool offerings they are sure to be in the lead in the year in which prepaid cellular takes off!

The New at&t is Everywhere!

Everywhere I turn lately I am being bombarded with the new at&t commercials! Online their banners are posted all over, on TV the commercials run about every hour on every major network and they are starting to appear in print now as well!

This has got to be costing them a huge amount of $$$$ and my guess would be that in about a month or so we will not hear or sear much more of them for a while. With an ad spend like this they will definitely have to go dark for a while or risk heading down the same path as the old AT&T.

I hope they didn't pay big bucks for the new logo and for having someone come up with the idea to spell out at&t in lower case letters. Still looks the same to me!

I have been a long time supporter of the old At&T, using them for my long distance and to buy phone cards but I am still a little skeptical of SBC and how much of the old AT&T burocratic mess they inherited. The reality is that AT&T became worse than government in their internal politics and processes that made it necessary for six people to approve an employee going to the bathroom and there was no way that they could turn the place into an efficient business being as large as they were. Well SBC is now in the position that they can streamline many of the areas but unfortunately by keeping the name they were no doubt forced to keep much of the burocratic mess.

All I can say is good luck SBC with becoming the new at&t and at least you picked a nice OASIS song for your TV ads.

Happy New Year

Took a little trip to celebrate the new year and just wanted to wish everyone a Happy New Year! All the best in 2006