A commenter on my last post thought there are three ways a Vonage-like service might continue to survive: rock-bottom prices, kick-ass customer service, and call quality. Any company that can excel at these three areas can survive, or so the theory goes.

I am going to ignore the sound quality issue and cover that later on. Instead, I'll focus on Customer Service. Having worked in Customer Service for over a decade, I can tell you one axiom that holds true: the people who pay the least often cost the most to service. This may not be true in terms of absolute cost, but it is often true in terms of cost versus revenue obtained from the end user. Just look at the economics of the situation. By the time a customer of a $20/mo VoIP provider actually reaches someone in their customer service department, they've already spent the revenue obtained from the customer and then some.

Customer service is not cheap. Even with an absolutely flawless service, there's bound to be more than a couple of customers out there who have substantial issues and talk to customer service-often.