July 23rd, 2007
Reader:recommendation by SunRocket like tobacco company suggesting cancer MD
Re the above– YA THINK?
And the bricks keep on being tossed on the gravestone:
Reader Phil from Fairfax County Virginia in the D.C. suburbs writes to tell me he briefly considered switching from the deceased SunRocket to either TeleBlend or Packet 8.
Yet it was the manner in which SunRocket left its subscribers out to see that convinced Phil to stay away from pretty much any other VoIP provider SR undertakers specifically recommended.
Phil writes:
After Sunrocket, the self-proclaimed “no-gotcha phone company” got me, and 200,000-plus fellow customers, and after I finally got their “terminal” email (and I do mean, terminal), I briefly considered switching to Teleblend…. briefly, as in less than one second.
As far as I’m concerned, being recommended by SunRocket (or their successors or investors) is about the same as a tobacco company recommending the best doctor to treat lung cancer. Getting a “here’s who we recommend to carry on the great Sunrocket service” was a laughable proposition, apparently designed to help generate some revenue for creditors based on the number of suckered Sunrocket subscribers who were gullible enough to follow their recommendation.
Personally, I considered 8×8, (Packet 8) which looks like a reputable and technically competent firm, and also Nuvio, which I found to be VERY accessible and helpful on the phone.
Ultimately I went with ViaTalk because they offered to honor the remainder of my SR contract term (6-plus months) and they had a good feature package …. I placed my order Monday evening, 7/16 and had dial tone on my self-provisioned, unlocked SR Linksys ATA by Wednesday evening. I’ve forwarded my old SR number to ViaTalk as they say it will be 20 to as many as 30 days before they can port the number over
The venture capitalists and Sunrocket executives who saw this debacle coming and did nothing to prepare the customers for the hard landing should make sure that they remove Sunrocket from their resumes.
Their handling of Sunrocket’s demise will quickly become a business school case study in how NOT to shut a company down. I hope those case studies name names.
Well, Phil, if those business school researchers come upon this blog entry…
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
