Our local cable company needs to get a clue. It’s rolling out a brand new VoIP service… but it’s afraid to call it VoIP. The company’s calling it a “digital phone” service, instead. This sets the bar for stupid marketing tricks. Attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of a sophisticated customer base is foolish. While the marketing weasels can try to obscure the facts, the VoIP Genie is out of the bottle…

I read about the new digital phone service in our local newspaper’s business journal this morning. The business reporter puffed up the cable company’s story, while failing to connect the dots, er, print the acronym: V-o-I-P.

Instead, a comparison was made with Time Warner and Comcast, who already offer their own VoIP services. Rather than refer to these services as Voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, the reporter used the term “digital voice”… complete with quotes.

(Maybe the cable company’s full page advertisement on the back page of section one had something to do with the kid gloves and the quotes. Maybe not. In any case, that big expensive full page ad didn’t say boo about VoIP.)

This all stinks of an ill-conceived marketing communications effort to control things that ultimately can’t be controlled. “Gee, boss, maybe our customers are really stupid or don’t give a hoot. You know, if we don’t use the V word in our marketing materials and apply enough spin to hide the facts, we might just get away with this.”

Don’t get me wrong. I actually like our cable company. It’s done a fine job of providing cable Internet service to Ranchero Indebto. (A tad pricey, yes, although it’s recently upped the speed.)

But this “digital phone” smoke screen is disturbing.

To be fair, the company offers all the bells and whistles typical of a good VoIP service: unlimited long distance, call waiting, caller ID, caller ID block, anonymous call rejection, call return, three-way calling, call forwarding, call back, selective call, speed dialing, and enhanced voice mail.

That’s all well and good (okay, almost all well and good).

The pricing scheme, however, is pretty sad. The digital phone service is $39.95 per month if you have full basic cable or full basic cable and Internet service. If you only have Internet service and/or limited basic cable, the price rises to $44.95 monthly. And if you only have its “digital phone” service (for some odd reason), you’ll be out $49.95 each month.

Those prices are considerably above the average for VoIP services. But it gets worse. The company charges an additional $2.00 per month for “modem rental” and $4.95 for voice mail. That’s right, it’s charging for voice mail and a VoIP gateway.

Forty Seven Bucks Per Month Is Not A Bargain.

All you need to do is take a quick look at my VoIP Plan Comparison Chart to see how the cable company’s “we can’t call it VoIP” offering is completely uncompetitive. Every one of the major VoIP providers blows the cable company out of the water.

SunRocket’s $199 yearly plan comes in at well under half that.

The whole point of VoIP, from the informed consumer’s perspective, is to take the power away from the entrenched semi- (or not so semi) monopolistic utilities, and keep those telecom dollars in our wallets.

It’s all about the power of choice. The open market allows us to pick and choose who we want to carry our VoIP calls over our expensive broadband Internet connections. Those local telecom monopolies (or semi-monopolies) are so last century…