Alec Saunders SquawkBox

SunRocket seems to have come to its senses this afternoon.  I received mail from PR guy Brian Lustig asking to chat.  He apologized for the headaches I’ve experienced trying to cancel, and admitted that the cancellation policy was unclear. SunRocket appears to really want to make good on its commitment to hassle free cancellation. Brian pointed out that they are among the few who don’t have a cancellation fee, and then committed that they would make their cancellation procedure more clear in the future. 

Next up I got a call from Natalie Sterling in the billing department who promptly, and without question, cancelled the account.  She also credited the payment from November that accrued while I argued with customer support.

And the piece of additional information required to “verify” my identity?  The credit card I ordered the service with, or my mother’s maiden name. 

Thank you.

For what it’s worth, if you’re in the market for a VoIP provider, SunRocket’s services are excellent, and the cordless VoIP phones they supply from ATS are tops. Just don’t try to cancel by email.

The business model du jour in VoIP seems to have become “free”.  Skype pioneered it by giving away terminations in North America, but rumour has it that this will go away soon.  But even when (or if) Skype’s program dies, there will still be plenty of other ways to make free calls:

• Gizmo Project has been giving away free terminations between members for some time. Starting in January, they’ll also have launched GizmoWeb, which is a web based service that doesn’t require the downloadable Gizmo Project PC client.
• Jajah was the first with a web based solution.  Just visit their site, put in two phone numbers, and make the call.  Super easy.  Calls between members are free, which gives you an incentive to get your buddies to join up.
• PhoneGnome also has a free calling service between any two members.  In fact, you don’t even need to buy the PhoneGnome box anymore — just join the service.  Once a member, of course, you can start to take advantage of all the other services they offer.

Are there any others that I’ve missed?

Most of the free services (with the exception of Jajah) offer you the ability to buy a phone number.  With this number, not only can you get free outbound calls on the service, you can now also be reachable.  A couple of companies have turned this model on it’s head, offering free phone numbers, but not terminations. 

• AOL’s AIM Phoneline offers a free phone number that terminates on the AIM client on your PC.  Add iotum to it (Q1 next year) and you will be able to redirect those calls to a traditional landline if that’s your preference.
• Grand Central offers a free phone number terminating on their unified communications system.  In actual fact, Grand Central is totally free.  They will offer paid services in the future, but for now it’s … free.

Free terminations puts a business in competition with the long distance carrier.  Indeed, historically most of Skype’s traffic has been international.  Free originations (the free phone number model) puts you in competition with the local carrier.  It says “don’t pay for a line.  Just get it from us for free”.  A number of small businesses I know of have chosen to dump the traditional land line, and replace it with a free service from AIM Phoneline, or Grand Central.

All of this would be moot if there was no requirement to connect to public telephone network.  There’s a certain degree of irony in the fact that all the popular business models are based on metering access to that old beast, isn’t there?

It was widely reported last week that the global email network is being overwhelmed by a surge in spam.  Spam levels have moved from 2.5 billion messages per month last June to 7 billion in November.  Spam apparently accounts for 9 out of every 10 email messages sent globally. 

I hate to be a pessimist.  It’s going to get much worse yet before it gets better.

A data point?  Prior to the passage of Do Not Call legislation in the United States, Gryphon Networks reported that telemarketing had reached an all-time high level of 19.2 billion calls per month. That’s a couple of calls per day, per American.  That’s what it took to get Congress to act.  

We’re a long way from that level with email spam.  A long way. 

VoIP often gets a bad rap when it comes to security. What with SPIT, VoIP phishing schemes, DOS attacks, and the like, it’s not surprising.  

Need some tips to overcome the nervous nellies in your organization?  Look no further.  In 25 Ways to Secure Your VoIP Network, the folks at VoIP Lowdown present a cornucopia of techniques to make your VoIP network more secure.  No doubt there are few good suggestions. 

I just got a pamphlet in the mail the other day from Rogers, offering all kinds of new services to buy on my Blackberry.  Included:

• Rogers NewsClip.  This handy application helps you save time by delivering the latest news, headlines, stock quotes and more from the Internet to your wireless device.  Just $3/month.  I’m not sure what this gets me that an RSS reader doesn’t, however, and Bloglines mobile let’s you choose the news feeds you care about, and best of all… it’s free.
• AskMeNow… gives you the answers you need quickly.  Type in your question, and for just 75 cents, it will answer back with a text message.  Google with a friendlier UI.  
• bbTV… stale news clips downloaded to your device for a paltry $5 per month.
• Mindit Assist.  This is a piece of software that allows you to customize responses to emails and add canned brochures, quotes and so on in response to email requests.  Useful, but pricey.  It’s the sort of thing I’d expect to spend $20 on once, not $20/month. 
• Sales Anywhere.  I can imagine that if you’re a sales rep dependent on SalesForce.Com this would be very useful. $25/month.

Some of these are potentially useful, but they’re priced to underwhelm.  Wireless carriers need to think a little bit more like customers, and a little bit less like wannabe monopolists.