Jul 19, 2007 -- Read the transcript of Clark's web-exclusive SunRocket message
This is a special message for people who go to Clarkhoward.com. I want to thank you so much for your support of our website and I want to let you know right from me what I've got to say about this mess with SunRocket. I'm miserable because I was a SunRocket customer for the past couple of years. I loved the service and I loved the price. You may have heard me joke about how my brother got a SunRocket "buy one year, get one free" deal even cheaper than I did. He'd just laugh about how he trumped me. He's not laughing now, and I'm certainly not. A lot of people on our message boards are hot at me for having recommended SunRocket in the first place. There was no way I could've known that they were in the kind of financial trouble they were in. They burned through a huge amount of cash. They were one of the best funded internet startups in recent years. Eighty million bucks went into the company and they blew right through it. I can't believe how badly they handled things as they ran out of cash, that they just basically shut down and left town. There's been so much negative publicity that the companies that originally put money in SunRocket are scrambling to arrange for customers to switch numbers and service supposedly seamlessly. Packet8 and Unified Communications are both offering such deals, but both of these are more expensive than what you were paying with SunRocket. Nobody is honoring your prior SunRocket payments. So that money is toast unless you paid by credit card in the last two months and you can dispute the charge and get your money back. But this thing stinks all the way around obviously. SunRocket had the risk of making you pay up front for a service you get over time. I paid my most recent year just four months ago. So I got four months service out of my $200. I paid about $50 a month for something I expected to cost $17 a month. You think I'm happy about that? I'm not. But I'm unhappier because I caused you a problem if you heard about SunRocket from me. Anytime you pay for anything before you receive it, there is this risk. This is just an unusually rotten situation. There are other companies out there that did not cut a deal with SunRocket that are offering special deals to SunRocket customers. There's a $199 company offering three months free to SunRocket customers. That's not much different than SunRocket's normal promotions. The cheapest alternative of all is to go with Skype, which offers unlimited calling in the U.S. and Canada for $30 for a whole year. It's not as easy to use as SunRocket, nor is it exactly like the same kind of service. But now there are Skype phones you can buy that make it as easy to use as SunRocket was.
