Sad headlines abound in the VoIP world lately: SunRocket sinks, Vonage stock sinks, joy and optimism sink. Wait, not every company in this market sings the blues. To see how the happier half lives, I contacted the folks at Bandwidth.com to see how they're doing lately.

CEO Henry Kaestner said, "Our premise is simple: we provide accountability and transparency. I'm proud of our customer retention rate, because we only lose .8% of our customers per month, meaning we keep 99.2%." For the record, that "churn rate" of .8% is so low cable and cell phone company executives will never see anywhere close to that rate for their own businesses.

One recent step from Bandwidth.com is the addition of some optional add-ons into its standard package price. Their Monitoring & Alert service is now bundled free with the Dedicated Internet Access packages. More than just an alert service that says "the network is down" when you check it to see why the network is down, the Monitoring & Alert service shows link utilization details, so you know if you're Internet connection should be upgraded or if you're handling your traffic load comfortably. And you can configure alerts to warn you when your connection gets busy, such as 80% utilization, rather than beep after the data line crashes.

Why give up revenue on popular services? Kaestner said, "We pioneered the Install Tracker service that let customers check the installation process, rather than leaving them in the dark like other vendors. Now that others offer a similar service, we want to do a better job."

Founded in 1999, Bandwidth.com came about because Kaestner and co-founder David Morken both ran small businesses previously and knew the aggravation of blindly waiting for data connections to be installed. "We waited and waited, and one day the telephone guy came, hooked up a couple of wires, and said we had a T-1. But our vendor wasn't there and we didn't have our router ready." Vowing never to do that to their customers, Kaestner and Morken made news with their Install Tracker service when they hit the market.

Another industry practice that aggravated Kaestner was the difficulty in discovering prices for data communications services. He would call, but no one could give him a price quote quickly. That's why the Bandwidth.com Web site includes more pricing information than most, and they guarantee that price across 10 different regional telephone companies that will install the physical part of the data connection.

James Gaskin writes books (16 so far), articles and jokes about technology and real life from his home office in the Dallas area.