VoIP Ranking by Subscriber: Q1 2006

Although Vonage is making all the headlines, the cable companies are filling the list with their not-entirely-VoIP products.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 19, 2006]

Rank	ISP	Subs. (thousands)	Date & Source
1	Skype (paid VoIP only, customers worldwide, date of this number unknown)	1,800	[July 27, 2005] Press Release
2	Vonage	1,600	[as of April 1, 2006] Fact Sheet
3	Time Warner Digital Phone*	1,370	[May 3, 2006] Trending Schedules [.pdf]
4	Cox Digital Phone* (as of December 31, 2005)	1,300	[February 2, 2006] 2005 Annual Report
4	Comcast Digital Phone*	1,300	[February 2, 2006] 2005 Annual Report
6	CableVision (cable VoIP under the Optimum Voice brand name)	863	[May 10, 2006] SEC 10-Q
7	CallWave (free and paid VoIP, counting subscribers, not lines)	780	[May 12, 2006] SEC 10-Q
8	Charter* (cable VoIP)	191	[May 12, 2006] SEC 10-Q
9	Packet8 (a.k.a. 8x8) (counting lines, not subscribers, thanks for the correction)	133	[May 25, 2006] Press Release
10	Insight Communications* (cable VoIP)	100	[May 10, 2006] SEC 10-Q
11	SunRocket	86	[June 8 , 2006] SunRocket Public Relations
12	Mediacom* (cable VoIP)	46	[May 10, 2006] SEC 10-Q
13	Covad (business VoIP only, 1,328 VoIP business customers with a combined total of approximately 42,800 VoIP stations)	43	[May 4, 2006] SEC 10-Q
14	GCI (Alaksa only)	25	[May 12, 2006] SEC 10-Q
	Note: data was unavailable for many VoIP service providers.
	Note: services with an asterisk * are digital phone, not true VoIP

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.

Note that we may not be aware of all VoIP providers, and therefore this is not a complete list.

VoiceGlo was removed from the list because the company has not updated subscriber numbers since December 4, 2004, and may fail.

Net2Phone has been acquired by IDT and did not report subscriber numbers, as far as we know.

Skype is offering free nationwide calling in North America, so the distinction between paid and free Skype subscribers is less than it might otherwise be.

We did not find updated numbers for Comcast Digital Phone.

These statistics are a snapshot in time, generally showing the race as of March 31, 2005, although some statistics are from different points in time. Note that Cox had not filed data for Q1, 2006, so the subscriber numbers for Cox are as of December 31, 2005.

Feedback June 20, 2006
Reader Johnathan Hooeps of thinkequity points out Cbeyond (NASDAQ: CBEY), a provider of small business VoIP services, with an average ARPU during the first three months of 2006 of $751. 85.5 percent of customers used one T-1 line, 13.7 percent used two, and 0.8 percent used three. It reported 21,909 business subscribers, but did not report the number of end users. If it had reported end users, it would probably rank in the top ten on our chart.

Feedback June 21, 2006
Brian Lustig, SunRocket PR, writes: Packet8's 133,000 figure represents lines rather than subscribers, and a large chunk of their recent growth are "lines" associated with their SMB Virtual Office product—where subs typically get 5 to 7 lines.

Also, Callwave's subs have almost nothing to do with VoIP, at least in the conventional definition. Most of their subs and revenue is associated with a voicemail service that is billed directly to the traditional phone bills. (It's basically an "Internet Answering Machine" that works with busy-call forwarding. It was popular in the dial-up era—if you were using your phone line for a dial-up connection, incoming calls would be routed to Callwave and invoke a pop-up call screener on your computer.) They also provide a virtual fax service that competes with eFax.