Previous Story: Congresswoman reintroduces spyware bill
Next Story: EBay initiative promotes electronics recycling

Vonage launches in UK
By John Blau

Consumers and small businesses in the U.K. can now take advantage of the same inexpensive Internet telephone service that Vonage Holdings Corp. offers its customers in North America.

Vonage, which calls itself the largest provider of VOIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services in the U.S., officially launched a new Net telephony offering in Britain on Thursday, according to company spokesman Jamie Serino.

"Our U.K. Web site actually went live over the weekend," Serino said. "Our first customers signed up within hours -- which is encouraging considering that we hadn't even begun to market the service."

Vonage has made a name for itself in the U.S. and Canada by selling a low-cost phone service. That, in a nutshell, is exactly what the company aims to achieve in the U.K., Serino said.

The prices speak for themselves: for £9.99 (US$19) per month, customers can make unlimited phone calls within the U.K. Small businesses are offered the same all-you-can eat phone service for £18.99 per month.

"Of course, you're always going to have the one or other business try to register as an individual to take advantage of the lower fee," Serino said. "But we have a system that monitors traffic and once we see that a connection is generating way too many calls for a single person, we'll call the customer to discuss the business fee."

Calls to mobile phones in the U.K. cost £0.15 per minute during business hours, £0.10 per minute evenings and £0.05 per minute on weekends.

Calls outside the U.K. are charged international rates that Vonage publishes on its Web site.

For an additional £3 per month, customers can also subscribe to a virtual number service. London-based users, for instance, can set up a local phone number in New York so that people trying to reach them from the U.S. only have to make a local or long distance call but not an expensive international call.

To use the VOIP service, customers need an always-on, broadband DSL (digital subscriber line) or cable connection. They are given a free phone adapter that connects their normal home or office phone to the digital modem, converting the analog phone signal to digital.

"Customers don't really notice anything different when they make a call using our service," Serino said. "They dial regular phone numbers and hear traditional dial tones."

However, customers must accept a new phone number. "We aren't able to port telephone numbers yet, but we hope to offer this service at some point," Serino said.

U.K. phone numbers currently available to Vonage are all London-based, according to Serino. "But we'll have more numbers from different cities soon," he said.

Vonage, which has more than 400,000 connections in North America, plans to expand in other European countries and Asia, according to Serino. But he declined to say where and when.

Posted January 7, 2005 07:16 AM | TrackBack (1)