AT&T Cancelling CallVantage Accounts

2007-05-07T10:45:00.000-05:00

Last week, AT&T announced that it would begin marketing CallVantage through 14 AT&T Wireless stores in Portland and in Central New Jersey. Mobile phone customers are going to be offered the landline VoIP service for $19.99 per month. The news is significant because AT&T had halted its VoIP marketing campaign abruptly in 2005, when it was acquired by SBC and it is now posing a competitive threat once again. The plan is to test a VoIP campaign's effectiveness in gaining landline telephony customers in U.S. regions that aren't served by AT&T in SBC and BellSouth territories.

Read USA Today's coverage.

However, simultaneously, AT&T is pulling the plug on CallVantage in certain other areas, due to its lack of compliance with e911 regulations established by the FCC. One customer reported receiving a cancellation notice for May 21st. Oddly, in one particular customer's case who was unable to keep his phone number when moving to a new provider stated that AT&T is refusing to provide a recorded message on the CallVantage line referring callers to the customer's new phone number. Instead, AT&T has established an online directory at www.lookemup.org for finding former CallVantage customers by their old CallVantage phone numbers.

The news is completely unsubstantiated at this time. The information originated on a message board at dslreports.com, which was then picked up by slashdot

There are two looming questions. First, what markets are affected by the cancellation and secondly, what is behing the lack of LNP support and unwillingness to provide recorded messages with a forwarding number? Hopefully, AT&T will clarify those issues soon.

Explore the VoIP market

Consumer VoIP in the U.S.

2007-05-06T19:14:00.000-05:00

I should get this blog started with some solid content. So, let's look at some numbers.

In-Stat does a fine job of tracking the VoIP market. In the last 6 weeks, the firm has released a series of reports ranging from the progress of the VoCable market to the status of PC to phone services in China. Today, I want to focus on the U.S. residential market.

In the U.S., In-Stat reports 10.6 million consumer VoIP subscribers (includes phone to phone and PC to phone), up from 9 million at the end of Q3 2006. The growth is primarily attributed to VoCable roll-outs along with Vonage's massive marketing campaign.

Of VoIP users, 61% of all (PC to phone and phone to phone) have dumped their traditional phone service and 76% of those with a phone to phone service are VoIP only households.

With the exception of Skype, VoCable rollouts have slowed the growth of the PC to phone market. Most PC to phone users place international calls (52%), whereas only 6% of phone to phone VoIP calls are international.

A growing number of VoIP subscribers are reporting use of their VoIP line for both personal and business use (51%), but very few VoIP users with home connections use their lines exclusively for business (4%).

For more information on the U.S. consumer VoIP market, check out In-Stat's "U.S. Residential Voice over IP Market Dynamics and Market Tracker: Market Summary Q4 2006."

On my desk, I've got a large stack of press releases related to VoIP and I may use this space to pass on some of the findings among various firms tracking the industry.

VoIP news and market data

The VoIP Report

AT&T Cancelling CallVantage Accounts

Consumer VoIP in the U.S.