What a surprise, well not really. SunRocket is shutting down it’s doors and announced Monday that it will begin the process of transporting the current 200,000 subscribers to other VoIP companies. How did this happen? I have no idea, 200,000 subscribers is defiantly sufficient enough to make a profit. Below is a message from SunRocket’s website.

After significant effort by the Company to avoid this result, SunRocket is in the process of discontinuing its operations as you know it. Therefore SunRocket will no longer be able to provide its customers with the phone service that its customers have been accustomed to.

However, two service providers are assisting and offering to provide SunRocket customers the opportunity to sign up for their services. Both providers have agreed to become preferred providers with special pricing for the SunRocket customers to enable them to migrate their telephone service. Of course, there are other providers and each individual customer can make their own decision as to which carrier they wish to transition to.

Emails to the SunRocket customers are currently being sent with more detailed information on how to sign up with the two service providers. The email address of the SunRocket customers that is on record is the address being used to send emails to the customers.

We realize this is a very difficult and uncertain period for the SunRocket customers. With these two preferred providers, the customers will have the opportunity to transfer telephone services.

An affiliate of Sherwood Partners, LLC is managing the process as the Assignee for the benefit of creditors.

Creditors to SunRocket will receive a notice within the next 30 days in regards to the general assignment and for the filing of claims in the liquidation process of SunRocket.

With SunRocket as a competitor out of the way, it means good news for the other VoIP companies. Currently, Vontage, Packet8 and ViaTalk have contract buyout specials targeting former SunRocket customers. They all look like pretty awesome deals but at this point it’s either impress or loose potential customers.

Problems and hassles include number porting if you want to keep the same phone number as you had with SunRocket, most likely you’d want to do that because customers had ported that number from their landlines and have had it for many years. The FCC regulations make porting a long process and said to take about 4 weeks for porting to complete. When I switched from Verizon to ViaTalk, porting took about a month. Until then, I had a temporary number which was inconvenient. I personally think that Google could have acquired it and prevented them from shutting down seeing as how they recently acquired GrandCentral, a startup telephony service.

So in a nutshell, SunRocket is gone, make way for new customers VoIP world!