The Janesville Gazette

"We offer customers who take all three services from us a substantial discount," he said. Charter can also ease telecommunicators' pain by merging all the services into one bill and asking them to deal with one company, Baltes said. "It just makes more practical sense to combine them all," he said. VoIP does have potential downsides. Some providers' services come with hurdles to reaching 911. And power outages drop some VoIP systems, unlike traditional landlines. Charter said neither emergency service nor power outages are factors with its kind of VoIP system. Many VoIP systems cost less than traditional phone services, because of loose regulation of the Internet that saves fees and taxes. This may seem a strange time for a telecom monster to dive into the home phone racket, with cell phones cluttering the market and multiplying. But Vonage, a VoIP pioneer, said in July it had doubled its customer base in six months after grabbing its 200,000th subscriber. Baltes said Charter's phone service has been a hit in the Janesville area. "The response has been over our expectations," he said. "It's gone over very, very big." Charter was founded by Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft. Earlier this month, Charter settled a class-action lawsuit over allegedly unnecessary fees. The company admitted no wrongdoing.