SunRocket demise casts doubt on business model

At first, Roger Shumaker didn't give it much thought when his phone service went on the blink.

"I'd get a dial tone on Monday, but it would go to a busy signal. Then sometimes there was no dial tone, then it wouldn't connect," he said.

Shumaker's broadband connection was fine, and the intermittent dial tone meant his Linksys router was OK. He just figured his voice-over-IP provider hit a technical glitch.

"With VoIP, you have an outage every now and then," he said, "but it's better than paying all that money to the local phone company."

Shumaker didn't yet realize he was one of the 200,000 subscribers left without landline phone service when Vienna, Va.-based SunRocket suddenly ceased operations July 16. There was no warning; no notification. The company was there one day and gone the next, but Shumaker didn't know it until he went online to investigate.

For more of Deborah McAdams' original reporting:
- read the rest of this story at FierceVoIP.com