If this posting in DSLReports User’s Forum is accurate, then this is what has to be one of the most short sighted and potentially embarassing moves I’ve seen in the short history of Vonage, and one that takes the cake of how not to do a marketing effort unless alienation of your most loyal and vocal customers is the goal.
First Vonage makes a big deal about the Linksys relationship. Existing customers with Cisco ATA or Motorola TA’s decide they want to reduce the number of devices drawing power and consolidate unsightly extra wires only to find out that they can’t keep their Vonage phone number for now, which in some cases may be the number they ported over from the era of the RBOC.
Obviously this is not all Vonage’s doing. Likely the equipment manufacturer is paid or receives some percentage of *NEW* activations, yet nowhere on the Staples web site does it say anything about existing customers other than the line “You will need to sign up for the service through Vonage separately, see details in box.”
Well in box means buy, then open where I come from. I also read the line to mean, and this is where operation definitions come into play, that by using post hoc ergo protor hoc logic (if this, therfore, thenfore that) the following makes total sense (except to Vonage)
1. To use the device you need to be a Vonage customer.
2. I want to use the new Linksys device with Vonage.
3. I am already a Vonage customer so I can use the device with my service that I already established.
4. I can buy this device and use it with my existing number.
Translation…unless you want to lose your current number, wait to buy what you can’t easily find at Staples…until the dust settles. My view is Vonage will find a solution to a problem that never should have existed. They certainly now have the money to pay someone to do just that.
Add to the FUD being tossed around about Vonage’s Retail Sales termination charges of $200.00 and you realize Vonage is paying a lot for retail space in the big box stores.
For those not schooled in retail, product companies pay what is called “slotting” fees to get products on store shelves. The slotting is collected in a variety of ways by the mass merchants via advertising, coop promotion, circular ad inclusion and more. In some cases a bounty per sale of hardware is paid, ala the cellphone business or a few years back, so called free Internet ISP service in exchange for a multi year agreement with AOL, MSN, etc. Using the theory that there is no such thing as a free lunch, Vonage is apparently linking early termination fees to offset the slotting and marketing costs, plus the cost of the TA into the “let me go fee.”
But by putting the information on the inside and not promoting it on the outside, it makes them suspect and could have them in court at some point once the consumer protection activists who live for causes like this do get wind of it.