Nevertheless, Vonage’s offering was not just Verizon over IP. Their solution integrated in the most obvious and useful features of voice over IP–voicemails delivered via email, followme/findme features, multiple DIDs on a single phone, and a few more.

Vonage is not just POTS–sure, you can’t place sip to sip calls, sure you can’t do a million other things. To people who play around in voice over IP all day, the Vonage feature-set are just the tip of the iceberg; nevertheless, for your tens and hundreds of millions still on POTS, it has an amazing feature set. Considering that it offered a great advance in features, good value, and–most importantly–was quite user friendly and accessable, from a product offering, they were able to be fairly sustainable.

Remember that most of the actual growth in the residential voice over IP market (in terms of dollars and subscribers) is actually by the cable companies these days. And their offering is just plain old telephone service without even the Vonage feature set. If you’re talking about cool technology, well, then it falls short. But, market sustainability? The market is actually favoring the old standby–boring old POTS, whether delivered over copper or IP.