Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

June 3, 2008

By Daniel Connor

Welcome to the Vonage VoIP Forum Digest

In the Forums
Having CallerID trouble? You're not alone. This thread goes back to June of 2007 but continually receives new replies. If you are using the Linksys PAP2 and 50% of your calls say "INCOMPLETE DATA" on your phone's Caller ID display, then you should read this poster's reply: "I have been having the unknown caller on id periodically for some time. Yet my dashboard always showed the id. I finally got off the couch and called vonage to downgrade my PAP2V2 from firmware 1.00.22 to firmware 1.00.13. Caller id has been working fine ever since! Tech support was helpful and quick to help with this "known issue" with 1.00.22 on the PAP2V2."

In the News
The New York Times had an article a couple days ago comparing Comcast with Vonage. While comparisons of VoIP providers are always nice, the article focused exclusively on voice quality and completely missed the boat in providing a price comparison. Even with Comcast's Triple Play package, you still pay $33/month for the IP phone service. Compare that with Vonage's $24.99/month or $9/month (27%) cheaper. If you're a "light" call volume customer, you can even get Vonage's 500 minute plan for just $14.99 with a low 3.9 cents/minute overage rate. Many customers are willing to sacrifice a little bit of voice quality to save >$100/year. Money doesn't grow on trees ya know? And with gas/oil & food prices the way they're going, people are pinching pennies where they can. Ironically, after espousing Comcast's talking points about how it's not VoIP, it's a "facilities-based I.P. phone provider" and how much more reliable Comcast is, the article author has a multiple hour outage due to "a power line feeding a Comcast hub, serving several thousand households, went down, and Comcast’s back-up generators failed to automatically sense the need to replace the loss of power."

An interesting company called Sharedband offers bonded bandwidth solutions that aggregate the bandwidth across multiple DSL, T1, T3, etc. connections. The benefit isn't only extra bandwidth, but their solution also aids VoIP since it can sense which line is having trouble. in fact, if one of the lines is dropped during a live VoIP call, the call isn’t dropped, but the audio gets “choppy” for a few seconds until the system seamlessly reconfigures itself to use of of the other lines. According to this article, "InnovaCrew is just starting to sell VoIP service based on Sharedband and expects a true launch in the third quarter." It adds, “I’d been looking for a solution to this for the last year and a half: How can I sell VoIP and differentiate myself from Packet8 or Vonage,” said InnovaCrew’s founder Josh Jacoby. What this means is that VoIP resellers, affiliates, etc. can add "value" to reselling VoIP solutions from Vonage and others, especially in the business marketplace. Vonage is currently underserved in the business market, but could actually do well in businesses with multiple broadband connections using a shared bonded bandwidth connections for added reliability.

Vonage Stock Report
Today, Vonage is currently trading at $1.84 (-$0.08) and closed Monday at $1.92 or 8 cents lower from Monday's close.

Vonage VoIP Forum Digest - June 3, 2008