U.S. VoIP Looks Sweet; New Rules for Canada's Phone Market
According to a new eMarketer report, the number of VoIP subscribers in the U.S. will jump to 32.6 million by 2010 - accounting for 40% of all high-speed households - from 5.2 million in 2005. In theory, this should be good news for Vonage's IPO prospects, which seemed to have evaporated as investors become increasingly skeptical about the company's ability to reduce its losses while it works to grow its subscriber base or even maintain it. In Canada, VoIP should be the spotlight later today when the CRTC - the country's telecom regulatory - makes a much-anticipated decision on how deregulation of the C$10-billion local telephone market will be handled. Many analysts expect a hybrid approach where urban markets with plenty of competition will be deregulated while rural markets with little competition will continue to be regulated. What's going to be interesting is how the competition is defined in urban markets. Will it be the number of competitors in a specific market or will an incumbent carrier have to lose a pre-defined amount of market share? I suspect it will be a combination of the two.
April 12th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
It would be interesting to know what % of those who have a phone also have internet access. These people may very well turn to lower-cost computer-to-computer or computer-to-phone VoIP alternatives. From what I've seen, companies similar to Vonage can't compete with the rates that these alternatives offer.