Verizon to Go All-VoIP In 7 Years

Verizon to Go All-VoIP In 7 Years
by Richard Martin

Watching its landline business continue to decline, Verizon will shift entirely to VoIP-based calling by 2016, chief marketing officer John Stratton told the Los Angeles Times at CES in Las Vegas.

“The company will start offering Internet calling to its FiOS Web and TV customers in the coming months, starting in Maryland,” Stratton told the newspaper.

Like chief rival AT&T, Verizon is losing traditional voice business to upstart VoIP providers, like Vonage, and to the major cable providers who’ve done an effective job at bundling voice service in “triple-play” packages with TV and Internet access. Verizon lost 3.7 million lines in the third quarter of 2008 compared to the same period a year ago.

Shares in both Verizon and AT&T tumbled sharply last week when a Bernstein Research analyst report downgraded the stocks. Verizon’s stock price lost more than 7 percent in one day.

What’s just as interesting as the VoIP-migration plan is Stratton’s comments on Verizon’s shifting view of its basic business model: “Increasingly, we are in the business of selling, basically, data connectivity," Stratton said.