Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Telephia published the results of a VoIP telephone service survey yesterday.  The survey polled a sample of the 2.9 million US “pureplay” VoIP telephony households.  They did not measure PC based usage, like Skype, nor cable usage, but focused solely on service providers like Vonage, AT&T and Sunrocket.  While excluding Skype and other PC based systems is defensible, it’s hard to understand why they took cable out of the mix. 

In any case, Vonage is the dominant player by a long shot in this segment.  With 53.9% share compared to second place Verizon at 5.5%, Vonage is the player to beat.  More interesting, perhaps, was their measurement of the reasons people switch services.  12% are expected to switch to another service provider in a given year, which suggests that churn in the VoIP service provider industry is much lower than the cellular industry, or the internet industry.  Most often, the reasons cited are voice quality (27.4%), customer service (14.7%), and price (13.4%).  Interestingly, Vonage’s churn (at 2.11% per month) is more than twice the Telephia figure, which suggests that if, in fact, Vonage customers are churning away to another VoIP provider, then the industry as a whole is benefiting more from Vonage’s marketing than Vonage is.