Vonage Reaches a Million Subscribers

Internet phone operator Vonage said Tuesday it now has more than a million customers, marking another milestone for the nascent industry of selling phone calls over Internet connections.

The 4-year-old firm, based in Edison, N.J., smashed the million mark on the strength of its present advertising campaign, which Jupiter Research analyst Joe Laszlo said he considers to be among the top two currently on the Internet.

Vonage Holdings Corp. is the largest of the new breed of phone operators selling VOIP (voice over IP), which is software that digitizes phone calls so they can travel over the Internet just like e-mail.

Calls to other VOIP users are typically free, while calls to and from traditional land line phones or cell phones cost a few pennies a minute.

Typically, VOIP plans cost $25 a month for unlimited dialing, about half of what local phone operators charge to make calls over their own networks, which use more expensive circuit-switched technology invented more than 130 years ago.

There are other VOIP operators with more than one million subscribers, but none have reached the milestone the way Vonage has.

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