VoIP Ranking by Subscriber: Q3 2005

VoIP growth continues, and no clear winner is in sight, but some first movers are doing very well.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [December 27, 2005]

Rank	ISP	Subs. (thousands)	Date & Source
1	VoiceGlo	2,750	[December 4, 2004] Press Release, number not updated
2	Skype (paid VoIP only, customers worldwide)	1,800	[July 27, 2005] Press Release
3	Vonage	1,000	[as of September 6, 2005] Fact Sheet
4	CallWave (free and paid VoIP, counting subscribers, not lines)	790	[November 2, 2005] Press Release
5	CableVision (cable VoIP under the Optimum Voice brand name)	600	[November 15, 2005] Press Release
6	Charter (cable VoIP)	90	November 2, 2005] SEC 10-Q
7	Covad (business VoIP only, 870 corporate customers with 29,900 stations)	36	[November 9, 2005] SEC 10-Q
8	GCI (Alaksa only)	16	[November 14, 2005] SEC 10-Q
	Note: data was unavailable for many VoIP service providers.

The dark side of this new new industry is the number of key players for whom no public statistics are available. As long as some major players are not reporting subscriber totals, growth, and churn, we will not have a clear picture of VoIP.

Please do not take these statistics as any indicator of who will be ahead in the future. They show who's ahead just out of the starting gate. The race is on, and other companies may jump in at a later date. These statistics are a snapshot in time, generally showing the race as of September 30, 2005, although some statistics are from different points in time.

The price problem remains
Pricing is a key factor (see the rankings in Broadband Reports). Cable companies and other companies that continue to insist on charging close to $50 should, in the long run, lose out to cheaper services unless they can block all other VoIP services on their network (see, for example, VoIP Battleground in RBOC Monopoly War, below).

Many companies are entering the VoIP business. AOL announced its entry, and SunRocket, founded a year ago, faced severe reliability problems but is improving, according to Broadband Reports.

Challenges remain (see below), but the industry is doing well.

Business VoIP, represented mostly by Covad in this list, is doing particularly well.

Note that we do not count VoIP trunking as VoIP, and do not list services like Time Warner's digital phone product. Time Warner reported 854,000 phone customers in Q3, 2005. Some additional data is available from Kinetic Strategies.