Coming Up: SunRocket Wireless?

Posted by: Olga Kharif on February 21, 2007

I’ve recently written about Vonage’s plans to offer cellular phone service later this year. Today, I talked to Stephan Beckert, an analyst at consultancy Telegeography, who believes that Vonage’s much-smaller rival, SunRocket, might look to offer wireless service as well.

SunRocket has announced no wireless plans. But Beckert believes such an offering would makes a lot of sense: Vanilla Web-calling services like the one SunRocket offers can only compete on price. But if SunRocket were to resell wireless minutes as well, that would allow the company to differentiate its offerings from competition’s and to acquire a new revenue stream. Providing wireless service makes a lot of sense for all Web-calling providers, in fact.

But unlike most Web-calling outfits, SunRocket may have the money to market such a wireless service under its own brand, at least on a small scale. The outfit raised $33 million in funding in mid-2006. That brings the total raised by the company to $80 million. So I wouldn’t be surprised if Beckert is proved right. Clearly, we will start seeing a lot more competition in wireless in the coming months.