SUNROCKET: Lost my phone number, lots of money and some face.
Written: Jul 23 '07
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OK, I admit it. I was wrong you were right,
Ma Bell, I want to come home. Can’t I come home? You rented out my room?
The good news is my mistake didn’t lead to a house being destroyed by a huge bag of jiffy pop from a space based laser, but the bad news is in a stupid attempted to spite AT&T and save a few pennies, I ended up losing money, losing my phone number, and losing a lot of face. Because let’s facing admitting you switched to a VOIP called Sunrocket that went belly up in 30 days, is pretty dang embarrassing. I mean SUNROCKET, what type of state of the art telecom company name is that?
In a world of fake names like Verizon, Cingular, and Vonage they had to call their company Sunrocket?
If being saddled with a stupid name wasn’t enough being saddled with the CEO’s that brought the MCI WorldCom failure to America most have been the icing on the cake. Had I know these guys were in charge I would have NEVER signed up. A friend of the family worked for MCI WorldCom and had his pension invested in worthless “company” stock. We can debate that to the cows come home, but the point is these guys have a history of screwing everyone.
When writing a review for a defunct company, should I take the time to tell you what they did?
THE HISTORY OF VOIP
VOIP stands for VOICE OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL. What this basically means is instead of using the copper phone lines AT&T spent billions upon billions of dollars installing into every home in the country (as mandated by law), this is before it got broken up and then put itself back together again. The VOIP skips the copper entering your house and uses your internet connection for the first hop.
Using a device (either you’re PC or a “gizmo”, voice information is converted to digital data, transmitted on the internet only to enter the telephone system at a cheaper point than your house. Because VOIP companies are not required to service everyone and since they don’t pay the cost of entering your home (you pay that cost with your ISP). VOIP is cheaper. Needless to say the telephone companies don’t like it since they are still carrying the same data, but not getting paid as much for it.
To set themselves apart from the phone company VOIP’s are offering unlimited plans. In the case of Sunrocket they offered unlimited incoming and outgoing calls for $19.99 (with 1 year prepaid). But it wasn’t a contract so you could cancel and get a pro-rated refund. Nice deal. Only one problem, the cost of doing business was MORE than the $19.99 they took in, as they got more and more customers they lost more and more money.
VOIP is nothing new, in the early days of the Internet I was talking over the internet on 36.6 kps modems, I once arranged a trip to Israel talking to complete strangers on the Internet so I would have places to crash on my post high school trip. This was 1996; the trip never happened because I had won free airline tickets to Israel but the dates available were not good for me getting back into the country in time for University. In the early days it (I-Phone) was an Israeli company no relation to the Apple iPhone that made this all possible, it was a PC-to-PC only service but modern systems allow PC to Phone calls and Phone to Phone calls all to be handled by a VOIP router, in a perfectly seamless way.
UNTIL
Perfectly seamless way until. . . . You loose power, loose internet, or your company rolls up its sidewalk and calls it quits with no warning what so ever. So when did Sunrocket call it quits? Sometime between Friday July 13th and Monday July 16th. I know this because I called them on July 13th with a billing problem; they had changed for $21 for my $9.99 plan and had even billed me for calls to toll free 800 numbers that I called. When I tried calling them again on Tuesday their phone said, Sunrocket the No Gottcha phone company, (then a computer sounding voice said), “We are no longer taking new customer or service calls, good bye”. Translation, Sunrocket the No Gattcha Phone company, Gottcha.
What to do?
Many people seem to be going with another VOIP, in my Epinion this is bad idea. The reason Sunrocket failed, wasn’t because it didn’t have enough users, it had too many users. When the cost of providing a service is more expensive than revenue you will go belly up, the more people that sign on the faster this will happen. This is why Sunrocket wasn’t able to find any purchasers. As the second largest VOIP, you would think anyone with money would want to buy them out, but no one did, this is sure sign the industry is DOA.
Now many cable companies are offering VOIP, my cable company offered its VOIP at a mere $40 a month in addition to the $40 for internet and what ever you are paying for Cable. But other systems are offering it for a little less, I’ve seen $33 for each service or all for $99 (not a great deal but better).
For my money I would go with T-Mobile’s hotspot, it is a cell phone and a VOIP phone at home it is VOIP for $9 a month and away from home it is a regular cell phone with seamless switching, in the car making a call, paying minutes, get home and bam you are using VOIP for free.
In my case
I went crawling back to DSL and AT&T
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
jckatz
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Member: Joe Katz
Location: chicago
Reviews written: 153
Trusted by: 74 members
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