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!