Comcast Goes For Pricey VoIP That Works When The Power Goes Out

from the interesting... dept

As expected, Comcast launched their VoIP offering today... but it's somewhat underwhelming. They seem to have pulled a Verizon-style offering, where they don't really want to compete with the other VoIP players out there, so they figure why not just charge a hell of a lot more? For Comcast customers, it's $40/month -- the same as Verizon charges for its VoiceWing offering. For non-subscribers to other Comcast services, it's $55/month which is more than what most traditional phone services cost -- meaning no one will sign up for this. Of course, they do have one interesting feature, but it's unlikely to be worth the extra $10 - $20 per month for most people: the Comcast offering has a 16-hour battery backup, so it will keep working if the power goes out. This is a big issue that plenty of people talk about, so it's interesting to see Comcast leading the way on this. Of course, you can bet that others will follow with similar offerings pretty quickly. Still, you have to wonder what Comcast is thinking. If they'd simply followed Cablevision's lead, and bundled in the VoIP for next to nothing as a loss leader, they'd get plenty of people who would suddenly value them over the DSL alternative, and the extra offering in the bundle would help reduce churn. Instead, it looks like they want to squeeze every last penny out of people -- which is unlikely to get them any customers who actually shop around.