All was not sunny and bright in the land of VoIP in 2007, with serious problems facing Vonage [0], SunRocket, and Skype among other VoIP carriers. The lessons learned in the just-past year will serve VoIP carriers and customers well as they move into the future.

Much of the trouble involved relatively small VoIP carriers and their encounters with much larger firms. Vonage spent the year with the specter of legal doom hanging over its corporate head -- only at the end of the year did word come that Vonage and Nortel had settled the legal case in which they'd been involved. Skype's encounter was of a different sort, but left the company no less changed after Ebay purchased the European VoIP firm, then spent the year trying to figure out precisely how to profitably integrate the carrier into its larger business.

Neither of these encounters was as dramatic as that of SunRocket with its larger corporate competitors. In July, faced with unexpected competition and burdened with a business plan that seemed unequal to the task, SunRocket suddenly went out of business, leaving thousands of customers scrambling for a dial-tone. The lesson? For customers, at least, the lesson has to be keeping an alternative carrier available as part of a disaster recovery plan.

For more:
NewTelephony has the complete story here [1]

Related articles:
Vonage settles with AT&T; expects positive cash flow in '08 Report [1]
Vonage settles with Sprint Report [1]