Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

May 23, 2008

By Daniel Connor

Welcome to the Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

In the Forums
You can buy just about everything else on eBay, so why not a Vonage router? Buying stuff on eBay is fun & addictive. But the question is, should you buy a Vonage router on eBay? Well, a thread over on the forums poses that very question. The short answer is "no". You get the latest & greatest router for free when you sign up with Vonage. However, the long answer is that if you cancel within the first few months, you'll be billed for the router and/or an early cancellation fee. But why would you cancel, anyway? ;)

In the News
Five9, Inc, a provider of on-demand call center solutions announced on Wednesday that Vonage deployed its Virtual Call Center offering in several divisions to manage marketing campaigns. Five9 features predictive dialing and outbound campaign capabilities that met Vonage's aggressive goals for customer outreach.

According to Vonage Customer Support Director, Lev Rejanovinshi, “We needed a quick, easy-to-use, easy-to-manage call center system to support operations in multiple divisions. We turned to Five9 for software features, implementation services, and training to get our departments operational in four days.” The Five9 Virtual Call Center is both agent- and supervisor-friendly. Easy set up and administration means supervisors and agents are on board quickly. “Using the Five9 system enabled us to execute several campaigns that produced winbacks and generated revenue. And we measured customer satisfaction using the Five9 system for polling,” said Lev Rejanovinshi.

What's interesting is that Five9 is a technology platform built from the ground up with VoIP in mind. It's a 100% hosted IP solution that marries VoIP, enhanced call center functionality, and business processes by leveraging the Internet. Vonage too is a hosted Internet solution that leverages the Internet to provide VoIP service. By Vonage choosing a hosted IP contact center solution it sounds like Vonage is "eating its own dog food" to me.

In other news, Keynote Competitive Research released a study comparing the relative performance over a single month of a local wireline service (AT&T) with seven broadband VoIP providers (AT&T CallVantage, EarthLink trueVoice, Lingo, Packet8, Verizon VoiceWing, Vonage, and Vonics Digital) and two cable voice service providers (Time Warner Digital Phone and Comcast Digital Voice) from calls made from residential locations in New York and San Francisco. The study states, that"consumers are more likely to experience merely tolerable, rather than completely satisfactory audio delay on VoIP calls." Seems a bit harsh if you ask me. If Vonage was merely "tolerable" it wouldn't have millions of users. The study also says that one VoIP provider required six seconds more than other VoIP providers to connect calls after dialing. Seems a bit odd to me, but probably a 2nd tier VoIP service provider. They also point out the obvious - that there were large quality gaps between VoIP providers on unmanaged networks and other service providers. “The service level performance of traditional wireline voice service continues to outperform the VoIP competition. Cable companies using managed networks are rapidly closing the gap and will continue to make this an exciting market to watch,” remarked Ben Rushlo, senior manager with Keynote’s competitive research group. Seems to be obviously biased in favor of cable companies rather than VoIP companies such as Vonage, Packet8, Lingo, etc. Ok, well if you want to pay more money per month for VoIP on a "managed" cable network for marginal voice quality you go right ahead. I'm stickin with with Vonage, thank you very much...

Vonage Stock Report
Today, Vonage is currently trading at $1.82 (-$0.01) and closed Thursday at $1.83 or 1 cent lower from Thursday's close.

Vonage VoIP Forum Digest - May 23, 2008