VON: Vonage touts VoIP success

SAN JOSE--Vonage is adding 15,000 new customers a week and is "on a quick and easy march to one million lines," Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Citron told the Voice on the Net conference Monday.

The company announced reaching 620,566 customers as of Monday, or roughly doubling in size since the end of 2004.

"We are crossing the chasm," said Citron, making reference to Jeffrey Moore's landmark book of the same name. "Voice over IP has hit the tipping point."

The bluntly spoken Citron was more than willing for Vonage to get its share of the credit for that progress, pointing to his company's 35% of the current U.S. market share, and the fact that it is adding VoIP customers faster than either of the number two or three players, Cablevision and Time-Warner, respectively. Comcast's entry into the market will shake up the market share chart, Citron conceded, but he says not even the nation's largest cable company will dislodge Vonage.

One reason, he said, is that Vonage is not standing still, but will add video, international markets and greater portability to its service offerings this year.

Among the new choices in customer hardware for Vonage customers is a Vtech cordless broadband phone system that will plug into a VoIP analog terminal adapter (ATA) and coming soon will be the F-1000 UT Starcom Wi-Fi phone which can take VoIP anywhere by roaming onto wireless networks, he said.

Just as important, Vonage, which now operates in Canada and the U.K., will expand into other markets in both Europe and Asia this year.

Citron touched briefly on this week's hot issue--port-blocking and the rural North Carolina phone company caught blocking Vonage calls--but spent more time exhorting the VON audience to push Congress to add open access for VoIP players to the national 911 infrastructure and to fix the Universal Service Fund. In addition, he said, the Federal Communications Commission needs to establish guidelines for Local Number Portability that reduce the current wait time to get numbers ported and gives VoIP players the same treatment as landline service providers.

"It's your broadband, you should be able to use it," he said.

Vonage is willing to pay its fair share of fees for access to the Public Safety Access Points that operate the national E911 center but believes it should also have direct PSAP access, he said.

"We need a national 911 system with national authority that governs regional answerers," he said.