Blackstone Out of Trouble!

In a follow up to a story I posted about back in February, Blackstone has successfully fought the fine that the FCC brought against them for failure to file the appropriate papers for a licensed telecommunications carrier.

Blackstone apparently ignored requests from the FCC asking them to file and make certain types of paperwork available and as a result was hit with a $20,000 fine. Blackstone has since provided the paper work proving that they are not a long distance carrier, just a distributor, and as a result the $20,000 fine has been removed and the matter dropped.

A lot of distributors make claims to be carriers, but as you can see the risk is too great and the cost too high. Blackstone is a more well established company with good legal representation and had the ability to get out of this fine but many smaller distributors should beware!

To read the complete ruling in this matter go to the FCC Website.

Will SunRocket's Closure Mean More Business for Us?

The VOIP world, which has been gaining lots of popularity due to Vonage's huge marketing spend, has experienced a huge blow this past week with SunRocket closing it's doors. The potential set back this had for the industry as a whole had so many of the major players worried, including Net2Phone and ViaTalk, that they rushed out and offered to pick up many of the remaining months of service for these customers free of charge.

SunRocket had about 200,000 customers at the time of it's closure, most of whom were locked into long 1 or 2 year contracts. What hurt the most was the fact that the customers had prepaid for their years of service and in the end were left holding the bag. Add this to the fact that Vonage is on shaky ground with the impending punitive patent infringement lawsuit from Verizon, and you have an industry whose future does not look so great.

For those of us in the prepaid calling card market can we look at this like one man's failure is another man's gain? It is still unsure how much these VOIP services contributed to the downturn in the phone card business in the first place, but it would be hard to believe that they did not at least play some small part in taking customers away. But before you go thinking that the business will go back to where it was, think about it long and hard. Some will come back but unfortunately it will most likely not be too many!

There are still so many other attractive long distance services gaining momentum like: prepaid mobile phones, Free PC to PC clients (Skype), Callback, Unlimited calling plans from traditional PTTs and many others. With all of these companies chasing the same pie, it is doubtful that prepaid phone cards can regain much. We are just an older out dated model whose only play left is with lower pricing and appealing to the credit challenged and recent immigrant markets (a group that is also becoming more savvy to the other alternatives).

Don't get me wrong... I am not saying prepaid phone cards are going to disappear tomorrow, it's just that this impending hardship in the VOIP industry is not going to mean many more sales for us!

Phone Card Commercial - Week 10 - Homies

A really budget commercial but I love the card name and concept!

Get a Pizza and a Phone Card!

Just read an interesting press release that a pizza chain out of Texas, Pizza Patron, will begin selling unlimited Mexico calling cards in all of their restaurants. The service is provided by BlagCard(TM) and the calls are mainly carried by at&t. Pizza Patron currently has over 60 stores in Texas as well as in a few surrounding states, with another 40 or so chains set to open within the next year.

Cards will be sold in $5, $10 and $30 denominations, delivering either 2, 7 or 30 days of unlimited calling to Mexico.

While the press release does not say if these cards will be available with delivery of a pizza, it is an interesting concept and truly a unique partnership the likes that this industry has never seen before.

IDT Gets A Bum Rap!

I keep getting questions and comments about IDT like so "How long do you think IDT has left?" and "Man do they suck" but somehow I can't help but feel like IDT is getting a bad rap!

I think people need to take a step back and realize one thing, if IDT is doing bad then most likely the other phone card companies are doing bad. The only difference is that IDT is a publicly traded company and all of their results have to made available to the masses, while the other companies can hide their woes.

The reality is that the phone card business is not what it used to be and never will be as big as it was ever again. However, this does not mean that international calling cards are a dead business, there is still a large market, it just will not provide the numbers like it used to do. I can't help but wonder if we were all allowed to see the financials of companies like STI, Dollar Phone, Locus, CVT, and Oblio that the downward trend would be the same!

Phone Card Commercial - Week 9 - Max

Sorry Everyone... Was out on vacation but I thought I would get back into the swing of things with this great phone card commercial from Europe for the Max calling card.

Enjoy!