July 17th, 2007
Ex SunRocket vendor on SR flameout: "we saw this coming a mile away"
Fascinating new insights on the SunRocket flameout are contained in a piece by TWICE (This Week In Consumer Electronics) writer Greg Scoblete.
Greg interviewed a former SunRocket vendor as well as a noted VoIP analyst who had followed the company closely.
“We saw this coming a mile away,” Adam Somer, president, American Telecom Services (ATS) tells Greg. Greg writes that Somer’s firm marketed a DECT cordless phone designed to work on SunRocket’s VoIP network.
“There were problems with the new management and their systems,” Somer added. “We began to transition our inventory over to our Lingo product line, so our exposure to this is minimal.”
Next, Greg spoke to Stephan Beckert, Telegeography research director. The problem: too much spending, not enough resources.
“They were looking for more funding and the investors stayed away this time,” Beckert tells Greg. And Greg adds that Beckert noted to him that while SunRocket had the second highest number of subscribers in the pure play category — which excludes cable companies — they were one-tenth the size of Vonage, the market leader
“Their growth had really begun to slow down since last year,” Beckert said. The company peaked in the second quarter of 2006, adding 46,000 lines vs. 19,000 in the first quarter of 2007, according to Beckert.I guess subscriber acquisitions slowed down to the point that potential investors got scared away.
And I don’t have to tell you what happened next.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
