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Unfortunately, they won’t or can’t cancel the number transfer. I contact Qwest to see if they can stop it and at first they think so, but eventually they say no, but let it go through and in a week they can request it back. So we do. This leaves me without the ability to receive calls for over 3 weeks. I tell the reps at Vonage that I want my number transfer cancelled and plan to cancel service – they warn me not to cancel until the number safely returns to Qwest. Qwest gives me the same advice.
It takes 20 days for a number to transfer – so this entire fiasco is over 40 days long. Cleverly, Vonage provides a 30 day money back guarantee. Criminal.

I learn this last fact when phoning to cancel my Vonage “service” (which never worked) and am told that 1) I’m over the 30 days to I have to pay $30 in cancellation fees and 2) I am charged an additional $50 for hardware that I bought up front for $89 in the first place and that failed within days of power up and 3) am told that they won’t even replace the dead hardware (although the rather smug-bitchy rep in cancellations is pleased to tell me that “if you had stayed we’d replace it but since you’re cancelling you’re out of luck”).

I’ll give Vonage some credit, but to call Jeff a revolutionary entreprenaur based on the creation of Vonage is way to much.

Adam

I have been Vonage for 2 years, have had no technical problems, other than the infrequent time my connnection went down, and the voice quality is unidentifiable as being VOIP.

And best of all, I am in Singapore! Let me say that again–SINGAPORE. All for $14.95/month for 500 minutes and I have a U.S. number. Give me a call and you’ll think I am sitting in NH. Don’t ask me to call back–it’ll be in the middle of your night. Now try that with your local Verizon service…

Two issues with Vonage and VOIP plays in general:

1) Landline voice is going the way of Long Distance: prices will asymptotically approach 0, and the market will be highly competitive all the way down.

2) The big carriers will compete, and cable is already adding more customers per month than Vonage. Vonage will end up like TIVO – having built a new market, but having captured little of the value created.

The point is not that Vonage is not better than copper, the point is that they really own nothing. When the cable companies decide to seriously compete and take a loss on the service for 2-3 years to capture marketshare (as Vonage is doing itself at the moment), Vonage is dead.

I can use any of these Vonages anywhere I can get a connection, not just on my local cableco. But more importantly, the management tools for the multiple phone and multiple lines with their call ring groups and follow-me forwarding and ring-everywhere capabilities simply blow the other national VOIP services out of the water.

If Vonage would get this message out there, the public would realize there is no useful and convenient competitor. Say, free installer to activate the house wiring with Vonage. If every jack in the house is on Vonage, instead of just one cordless handset, people will realize it’s not one o’ them Innuhnet thangs.

When it works, Vonage’s call quality is fine. But if you need support, just forget about it. That’s how they lost me. I’m paying substantially less for Broadvoice and quality is just as good.

Have you actually tried using Vonage? I mean really…before you post some B.S. opinion – you might at least TRY the service first.

Or at least TRY calling their customer service number…

Before you can have a comparison to a company like MCI – you have to achieve a comparable level of SERVICE and QUALITY.

As for how the LECs are competing now, even the lead-footed mastodon Verizon has a VOIP plan at the same price point as Vonage with no sign up fee (though you can call a few countries in Europe on the Vonage plan that aren’t part of the Verizon offering). It is a recent conversion to aggressive pricing, but one senses that Verizon has grasped that the POTS value proposition doesn’t cut it anymore.

Writing off Skype and GYM as competition is naive. Yes, they are not perfect substitutes for Vonage, but to say that they do not represent competition is laughable. Vonage is not a perfect substitute for a POTS line, nor is a cell phone a perfect substitute for a POTS line, yet both have had a dramatic impact on access line counts at the LECs. Most adults in their 20s have decided that cell phones are “good enough” and never get a landline and many consumers will find Skype “good enough” and pass up Vonage’s more expensive solution.

With regard to the difficulty of porting numbers from the LECs, based on what I have read around the web, Vonage is starting to resemble a roach motel for phone numbers itself. They need to think hard before they pick up that particular rock and start throwing.

Finally Vonage got the IPO it deserved. The company knew it would have difficulty selling the stock to institutions due to the competitive threats it faced in the business. It picked underwriters with big retail customer bases, shamelessly flogged the offering to its customers – most of whom wouldn’t know any better, and upped the size of the deal so as to raise as much money as possible. If Vonage was really concerned about the aftermarket performance of the IPO, they would have cut the size of the deal and priced it much lower. This was a “do or die” deal for Vonage – their marketing programs would soon have come to a halt without it. Nothing in their behavior suggests they had any concern about where the stock traded post deal.