Vonage Goes Public? The Downside of IPOs
The picture above shows the delightful kit that more than 1.6 million, American subscribers have purchased to link up with Vonage, VOIP service. Drawn by the concept of unlimited long distance calling at a price point of $25.00 a month and a starter package that was typically available for free after rebates, there was little disincentive at the front end to “giving it a try.”
My family did. Unlike other VOIP offerings, Vonage is do it yourself. The picture below shows one type of outdoor telephone box that any neophyte attempting to install Vonage service must decipher and modify in order to hook up more than just one phone.
Online forums found by searching for Vonage in conjunction with a variety of pejorative terms suggests that the company’s subscriber base is far from stable. Googling “Vonage” and “sucks,” for example, turns up over 200,000 hits. A quick read of just a few of the stories would have been more than sufficient to discourage even the most risk tolerant of speculators to pass on last week’s Vonage IPO.
As it stands, Vonage stock is off 30% from its initial price of $17.00. “Going public,” is not a panacea for company ills. A fundamental axiom for a successful IPO is that a company must offer a product that creates customer value. High subscriber turnover suggests dissatisfaction and the dissatisfied multitudes that have disappeared out Vongage’s back door would unanimously agree regarding this IPO, “I told you so.”
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 3rd, 2006 at 3:10 pm and is tagged with vonage ipo, fundamental axiom, american subscribers, unlimited long distance, subscriber base, starter package, initial price, telephone box, customer value, voip service, speculators, multitudes, panacea, dissatisfaction, ills, back door, downside, rebates, ipos, 6 million. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.
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- Vonage Goes Public? The Downside of IPOs
initial price, voip, price point, service, vonage, pejorative, googling, starter package, online forums, telephone box, unlimited long distance, subscriber base, neophyte, multitudes, decipher, ipos, downside, tolerant, rebates, ...
on June 4th, 2006 at 10:48 am
Vonage:The Downside Of IPOs…
Some reasons why the Vonage IPO may have been a downer…….
on June 11th, 2006 at 10:35 am
vonage is the worst service you can choose. i tried it and the killer was that people would call me and get a recording that my line was out of service.
call quality is worse than a cell phone. cusotmer serivce sucks.
they cant even make money charging a lot of people for service they dont provide.
i hope the iPO victims get there money back - smells like fraud!
on June 11th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
Our experience with quality was very unsatisfactory as well. Sometimes there was echo, usually the sound was “tinny”, very often there was no sound at all.
on July 11th, 2006 at 12:59 pm
Listen up folks and read: Vonage is a rip off company who do not disclose all of the facts-example if you are with Bellsouth you have to purchase a line from Bellsouth and pay Vonage also for the service in which they are to provide. My question was why would any sain person would agree to something that is truely crazy, so instead of paying one bill now I am suppose to agree to pay for a land line, dsl, and Vonage, I think not. So, you know what Vonage did they charged me 39.99 when apart of their spill is “not to worry if you are dissatisfied within the first 30 day that you will not be charged and we will refund all monies debted from your card”, this is a lie instead being refund I was charged and additonal $39.99 for cancelling the service and it had not even been 7 days. In fact my so called account/service had not even been activiated but they charged my account. Beware fellow comsumers.