Loading ...By Sharla Sikes
When SunRocket went belly-up, Packet8 stepped in as one of the providers transferring customers over to its service.
Now Packet8 is poised to do the same again, only we don’t know the name of who else might be going under.
Under the agreement, Packet8 would be the recommended new provider for the closing company’s former customers. Some 12,000 subscribers would receive an offer for a Packet8 monthly service plan plus one free month, free activation, phone and shipping.
“We look forward to welcoming these VoIP consumers to the Packet8 family of subscribers,” said Huw Rees, 8×8 VP of sales and marketing. “8×8 has been providing VoIP services since 2002 and, unlike many competitors, has established a strong business model providing subscribers with solid assurance that our service will be operational for the long term and that our reputation for quality and reliability will be maintained.”
Everything seems to be coming up roses for Packet8. The VoIP provider also recently announced that it has been issued a patent for speech processing. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued the patent on Sept. 18 to cover Packet8’s method of speech signal processing, specifically multi-pulse speech analysis and synthesis systems.
Packet8 has been awarded 69 patents since the company’s 1987 launch.
Packet8 seems pretty happy with its market share, according to CEO Bryan R. Martin.
“We are once again the second largest stand-alone VoIP provider in this market space,” Martin said during his keynote address duringTMC’s ITEXPO West 2007, held this week in Los Angeles. “We deliver both voice and video service to residential customers, and there are now a growing number of businesses that use us as a replacement for their PBXs. We develop all of our own technologies in-house, and we’ve been awarded a number of patents. Our sales last year were about $53 million.”
Martin says that the summer of 2007 has been unusually for the company, and claims that more than 100 companies have closed down or will close in the future. He says that despite the huge losses some companies have suffered, there’s hope for VoIP’s future.
“So, are we actually entering a dot VoIP meltdown? Will things shut down next year?” he said. “I don’t think so. In fact, I think there’s a big opportunity out there and let me tell you why.”
Martin continues to say that in the highly competitive VoIP market, prices were dropping fast, especially with Skype www.skype.com bringing expectations of free calling. However, he says that recent changes in the market have slowed those dropping prices, and brought better profits back to VoIP providers—some of whom were struggling to stay competitive. Many of those may not recover, and Martin expects Packet8 to pick up the subscribers from providers who didn’t weather the storm.
“As the provider shakeout continues,” said Martin, “you’ll see things strengthen, since we all do things for money. We just introduced a business service last month that actually costs about $150 per seat per month. So we are moving up the value scale with these types of services. These services are differentiating. They are evolving. Differentiating services are finally starting to go mainstream. At the $150 price point we’re also extendingPBX feature sets to include Boomerang, voicemail functions and all sorts of interesting new features that people love to use. There are now things such as the autoattendant-type of accessibility services that are improving and we’re starting to charge for components of that. And they are being used by these companies. We just have 1,000 new companies sign up for our services in the last three months. These are big numbers and big companies.”
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I wonder how Packet8 will continue to do as their percentage of residential users continues to grow at a higher rate than their business users. I always figured they did all right because they had a stable business user base, and those users spend more money than residential voip users do. As a matter of fact, when Sunrocket went under, and people asked Packet8 if they were worried, they said no because of their business user base.
Now that they are picking up all of these residential users, who require more services per dollar than the business users do, I wonder if they will continue to stay in the black. Of course, as long as most of their customers stay with the $24.95 monthly plan, they should be OK, it’s the ones that opt for the $199.00 yearly plan that could cost Packet8 in the long run. Sunrocket did the yearly plan thing, at a reduced rate, and we see where that got them. LOL