VoIP Toolkit

Life's sweet for Citron

Tags:
Citron,
Vonage

Ben Charny CNET News

Published: 07 Jan 2005 12:00 GMT

Three years after opening for business, Vonage has become the largest provider of voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services in the United States, and has just launched its service in the UK. Much of the credit goes to CEO Jeffrey Citron, an acerbic-tongued Staten Island native whose rough edges have shaped the public persona of this fast-growing start-up.

Along the way, however, the scrappy company has earned its fair share of rivals. Some competitors speculate (sotto voce, of course) that Vonage's 15 minutes of fame are about up and that the company is doomed to be elbowed aside by far larger cable and telephone companies. Whether that's an accurate prediction or just wishful thinking, there's no question the industry is evolving fast. More-established companies are finally getting aggressive with their own Net phone services -- and that's likely to raise challenges for Vonage.

ZDNet UK sister site CNET News.com recently spoke with Citron about the changing face of the VoIP industry and what it might portend for his company.

Q: Some estimates say there will be one million total VoIP subscribers in the US by January 2005. What's your guess?
A: I expect one million for the year, maybe a little more. If we just add the numbers up, everyone's on track to tap out over a million. I've read some projections for 2005, and most come in at 2.7 million total lines by the end of the year. That's also a pretty reasonable expectation.

That's a pretty aggressive figure.
People might have thought it's aggressive at first. But in light of really good numbers coming from Time Warner Cable, Cablevision and Vonage, that data now looks conservative. How conservative remains to be seen.