I paid the bill, honestly. Actually my phone is not disconnected but rather the phone company Sunrocket went out of business without not so much as an email to notify me and their more than 200,000 other subscribers. I had to find out on Twitter. After Dan Mosqueda posted that Sunrocket was shutting it’s doors today I called my home number and got the beginning tone for a disconnected number and nothing else. I had other people call as well and they got nothing. I logged into the Sunrocket site and voice mail was not available. My immediate concerns were missed calls and then my thoughts went on to whether I would lose my home number since it appeared that the company had shut down everything.

How is it that you can be a customer of a company for more than 2 years and that company could have such little regard that they cease to exist without any notification whatsoever? This reminds of the Dot Com Bubble Burst in that a lot of services that I used abruptly ended. The difference is that those services were free. For this I had prepaid $199 for the year. In addition, this was no arbitrary service – it was my home phone and I had ported my actual home number to it when I first signed up for Sunrocket.

Overall I was satisfied with my Sunrocket service and had recommended it to friends who I had to contact to let them know that their phones may not be working today. How embarrassing.

At any rate, Sunrocket showed a lack of professionalism and a total disregard for its customers by ceasing operations without notice. A home telephone is an important service to have. While I’m sure that most of the 200,000 subscribers had cell phones to use as backup, it is a gigantic safety (and convenience) issue to allow the “phone lines” to go dead. It has to be a violation of some federal regulation to just turn all the “phone lines” off.

At any rate, I will be disputing the prepaid charge on my credit card. I will also try to find out who Sunrocket’s owners were so I can steer clear of their future business ventures.

Update: When I got home my phone was working again. No idea how long that will last. Also, I signed up for Vonage whose future is uncertain as well due to Verizon patent issues. According to Vonage it takes 10 days to port an existing telephone number. I wonder how long it will take since Sunrocket is no longer operating. In the meantime, I’m giving out my GrandCentral number so people will be able to reach me.

Tags: sunrocket sunrocket shutdown voip phone service

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