Speakeasy, one of the remaining broadband voice providers, is finding that simple things like offering a free phone is a nice way to drive up its subscriber numbers. Since launching the promotion in March, an effort it says was designed to lower the barrier to adopting VoIP, has driven up its subscribership by more than 40 percent year-over-year.
Any business customer that subscribes to Speakeasy's unlimited or global Hosted Voice calling plans with a minimum of five lines gets a free Polycom SoundPoint IP 321 VoIP-enabled phone. The promotion will expire at the end of this month.
In announcing its subscriber milestone, Speakeasy was able to cite one customer, the Rofo Group, a company that runs a specialized search engine that helps companies find office space, turned to Speakeasy after being disappointed with a competitor's voice quality. After ending its trial with the competitor, Speakeasy was able to light up Rofo's voice installation under two weeks.
"With the free phones offer, there were no up-front costs at all," explained Mike Garrity, COO at The Rofo Group in a release. "Plus, Speakeasy provides an end-to-end solution including broadband, so they were able to guarantee the call quality we couldn't get with our previous provider."
While Speakeasy lacks the scale of large incumbent telcos and cable operators, the service provider has found a growing audience of smaller businesses that are looking for alternative providers. The service provider's impending merger with Covad and MegaPath could expand its service reach to an even larger audience.
For more:
- see the release here
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