North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Vonage service suffers outage

  • From: Michael.Dillon
  • Date: Mon Mar 07 10:59:53 2005

> No, what makes this "newsworthy" is exactly what Om Malik
> says: VoIP is being oversold.

Let's be clear here. Vonage is not a VoIP company.
They do not offer a VoIP service. They are a phone
company that offers a type of phone service which
leverages VoIP to handle the last mile connection
to subscribers. Many other phone companies such as
Verizon or Qwest leverage VoIP in the interLATA or 
international parts of their network. They aren't VoIP
companies either.

For true VoIP companies look at XTen who make a 
VoIP softphone or Grandstream who makes physical
VoIP telephones or Digium who sponsor the Asterisk
PBX software.

VoIP is just a suite of protocols that can run over
anybody's IP network.

Companies like Vonage are signing up subscribers because
they provide real phone service connecting you to
copperline subscribers on the real phone network. That
is their business model. Verizon could sell exactly the
same sort of service to subscribers in California leveraging
the Internet last mile in exactly the same way as Vonage.
Vonage and Verizon are just phone companies, not VoIP
companies.

--Michael Dillon