April 6th, 2005
3 important lessons the new Verizon VoiceWing price plan teaches us
As our sister site CNET News.com reports today, Verizon is out with a new pricing plan for its VoiceWing VoIP service.
Verizon VoiceWing 500 offers (well,duh), 500 minutes of outbound local and long-distance calls a month,as well as unlimited inbound calls and free calls to other VoiceWing subscribers.
The price point is real interesting. We’re talkin’ $19.95, little more than half the $34.95 a month for unlimited calling if you are not already a Verizon DSL subscriber.
What are the overarching lessons from this pricing regimen? I see two:
1. VoIP services pricing models are starting to look like cell phone price plans.
2. The major ILECs will charge as low as they can in order to diffuse competitive threats from the deep-discount, pure-play VoIP providers;
3. This cannot be good news for the pure-play folks. Over time, some will fold, and others will be acquired. Another reason why - as I said on Tuesday- that Vonage ought to be acquired by Sprint.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
