Study: consumers twice as likely to sign up for VoIP if part of a price-bundled service

It's hardly a revelation that incumbent broadband service providers are, and will continue, to introduce VoIP services as part of a bundled package of products.

From a pricing standpoint, these services are and will cost signficantly less when they are bundled as compared to their a la carte price points.

This strategy creates the impression among consumers that they are getting a bargain. Of course, depending on the bundled price, they may or may not be. But that is how VoIP is going to be marketed. Cable companies, for instance, are - or can be expected to- price VoIP within a three-in-one offering that also includes high-speed Internet and digital cable.

Cable and ILECs that offer VoIP may or may not offer bundles at attractive prices, but you can say one thing about these conglomerates: they are not stupid. Considerable consumer research, much of it proprietary, has gone into these pricing models.

Now, we have results from a non-proprietary study that would seem to indicate consumers want bundled pricing. A Decima Research canvass of more than 2,000 residential Internet users in Canada found that while only 9 percent of respondents said they were "definitely or probably" going to subscribe to a VoIP service in the next year, some 20 percent of overall respondents said they would do so if the VoIP service was offered in a discounted bundle.

I realize this is a Canadian survey, but my hunch is that American consumers aren't all that different.

Do you know people who are sitting on the fence about VoIP, but would subscribe if the service were part of a bundled offering from their broadband provider? TalkBack to us.