America’s second largest pure-play VoIP provider, SunRocket, suddenly cut off its service yesterday evening, amid a swirl of reports that the company had laid off the remainder of its employees and was intending to go out of business.

Second only to Vonage among standalone VoIP providers, SunRocket had approximately 200,000 customers as of April. It has recently been running low on funds, however, and was forced to terminate a significant percentage of its workforce, including a number of key executives, earlier this month.

By discontinuing service and cutting off its customer support line, SunRocket has confirmed in the most unprofessional way what bloggers have been expecting for the past several days.

The sudden demise of SunRocket, along with Vonage’s ongoing legal problems, paints an eerily morose picture for the entire pure-play VoIP sector. As big cable aggressively conquers the digital voice market, fewer and fewer customers are willing to go with the little guys — and with disasters like this SunRocket debacle, you certainly can’t blame them.

For quite some time now, hope has been fading for residential VoIP startups, and SunRocket’s closure has confirmed the inevitable. The fact that they couldn’t even find a buyer for the company really says it all.

Rest in Peace, broadband phone you’ll be long forgotten soon enough.