VOIP Company Vonage Reaches a Million Subscribers

Although I prefer  Skype, This is worthy news:
Internet phone operator Vonage said Tuesday it now has more than a million customers, marking another milestone for the nascent industry of selling phone calls over Internet connections.
The 4-year-old firm, based in Edison, N.J., smashed the million mark on the strength of its present advertising campaign, which Jupiter Research analyst Joe Laszlo said he considers to be among the top two currently on the Internet.
Vonage Holdings Corp. is the largest of the new breed of phone operators selling VOIP (voice over IP), which is software that digitizes phone calls so they can travel over the Internet just like e-mail.
Calls to other VOIP users are typically free, while calls to and from traditional land line phones or cell phones cost a few pennies a minute.
Typically, VOIP plans cost $25 a month for unlimited dialing, about half of what local phone operators charge to make calls over their own networks, which use more expensive circuit-switched technology invented more than 130 years ago.
There are other VOIP operators with more than one million subscribers, but none have reached the milestone the way Vonage has.
One notable member of the million subscriber club is Skype Technologies SA, a Luxembourg-based VOIP operator founded by the creators of Kazaa, the peer-to-peer software for swapping files.
But Skype's achievement is literally only half of Vonage's. About 1.2 million people subscribe to SkypeOut, which allows Skype users to make phone calls from their PCs to any phone for a few cents a minute. SkypeIn, a tandem service for receiving calls, is sold separately.
Vonage has also managed to grow—it has doubled subscribers during the last six months—despite serious challenges from major U.S. cable operators Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications Inc., Cablevision Systems Corp. and Comcast Corp.
In the past two years, all of these cable operators have embraced VOIP technology as a way to sell phone service to their broadband or cable TV customers.
But once again Vonage stands out. Both Cox and Comcast said they each have more than 1 million phone subscribers, but the vast majority still use a network of circuit switches rather than VOIP technology. Time Warner Cable, which uses VOIP exclusively, has about 614,000 subscribers. Cablevision has about 250,000 VOIP subscribers.