After much speculation, Vonage is finally introducing local number portability in Canada. This should give Vonage another tool in convincing reluctant Canadian consumers to climb on the VOIP bandwagon. Another important development is Bell Canada’s willingness to offer "naked DSL", which means Vonage customers do not have to have local and high-speed service from Bell to use Vonage. Vonage said customers can now transfer numbers from most major Canadian telephone companies in all 14 of its local service markets.
The big question is when demand for VOIP will pick up in Canada. While there has been lots of hype, there were less than 35K residential customers in 2004. This, of course, will like change this year as Bell, Rogers, Videotron, Shaw and Cogeco move into the VOIP market.
Another huge challenge facing Vonage and rivals such as Primus and AOL is penetrating multi-phone households. Vonage is great for a one-jack home but it is less than elegant if you want to use the phone jacks around the house. Vonage can either come up with an easy way to connect to home network, or it can do something like bundle multi-phone (two, three or four handsets?) cordless packages with its telephony service. Until this problem is addressed, there will be many, many households that Vonage and its peers will be unable to access from a primary line perspective.