Vonage Blows

Vonage positions itself as the new, friendly company that would never rip you off like your traditional telephone company might.  Things are not always as they seem.

Browsing through any of the plans on the Vonage site you’ll find the claim “No Annual Contracts” proudly displayed.  A closer inspection of the terms of service provides the following:

3.6 Termination Fee (Does Not Apply to Business Plus Customers). You will be charged a termination fee of $39.99 per voice line if your Service is terminated for any reason after the Money Back Guarantee period and within the first year following the activation of your Service.  

I don’t think we need Judge Judy to rule on this one.

I’m sure there are two sides to this story, but at the same time I think Vonage actively pushing people to port their existing landlines is irresponsible. They are not ready to provide the level of service required of such a utility and should only be offered as a supplement to existing service.

Check out the full story at:

http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news04/2006/03/vonage_fire.html

By the way, ConsumerAffairs.com has a great collection of horror stories around Vonage. Click here for that collection.

Looks like Vonage is blowing through money left and right and wants to go back to the well to have the market fund their downward spiral. They’re looking to raise $250 million.

VoIP Watch first reported the news in this article.

The good news is that there is a big shakeout in progress at the top- the CEO, Michael Citron (see the post below) has been terminated. Also, Vonage is bleeding cash, with a loss of $310 million since inception, and $176 million spent on marketing from 1/1/05 to 9/30/05 (thanks Om).

Update: A quick thanks to the reader who commented on the new role for Citron -as Vonage.com states: “Citron Will Continue On As Chairman, Elevates Into Global Strategy Role To Apply Vision To Vonage’s New Efforts”

As I mentioned in the comment, I believe this is a bit fluffy.  They need some real management to come in to turn this around, and even Citron knows that.  Of course, he’ll retain the chairman position as the largest shareholder.
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Vonage has EXTREMELY poor customer service. If you’re reading this, you may have already learned this and are looking for a remedy for your cancellation, quality issues, or billing problems. I’ll give you the fast route to problem resolution.

Email any support issues to: jeffrey.citron@vonage.com

For good measure, cc: louis.mamakos@vonage.com

It might seem a bit unusual to email the CEO and CTO directly, but it’s also unusual to go weeks without support from a company you are paying monthly. Emails to these guys will move your case to the “Executive Response Team” which is actually based at Vonage HQ and reasonable at problem resolution. You can also try calling this team directly at (732)-333-1621 (M-F, 8a-8p).

I hope this saves someone else some time.

Like many other folks, I originally signed up for Vonage to enjoy cheap or free long distance, great international rates, and a normal quality phone line. While everything started off rosy when I signed up in 2003, I found that as Vonage expanded the quality of service provided was reduced drastically.

Some examples of the pain I’ve personally experienced:

• International calls to certain countries no longer worked as Vonage shifted traffic to lower-quality phone networks
• No response whatsoever from the support email addresses other than the automated responses for repeated inquiries; no hope of getting through to the phone support (which is widely reported to be useless anyhow)
• Complete outages of service confirmed to be due to problems on Vonage’s end with no service credits or apologies from Vonage even though service was unavailable
• Customer portal completely unresponsive and unreliable at times - even checking the date of my first order as I write this is a great pain (over 30 seconds for a page to display)

Meanwhile, Vonage spends money wildly on marketing without addressing current customer concerns. Where has the $650,000,000 in funding gone?
So, that’s why VonageBlows.com exists. I’ve never felt the urge to create this kind of soap box on the web, but it sickens me to see a company with this poor of service pulling more than one million customers. Most of those customers probably don’t consider the pain and penalties required to get out of their contracts with Vonage.
Here I’ll attempt to gather some of the best stories and guidance about Vonage’s issues and hopefully provide food for thought for those who consider Vonage but end up Googling it first. Feel free to drop me a note at admin@vonageblows.com if you’d like to share or have suggestions.