There’s a lot of speculation if Vonage will go public. One things for certain, in many ways they are acting like a public company already. Based on what I saw in their briefings with analysts and press they are conducting themselves that way.
That said, Vonage needs to come clean and stop dancing around on some key issues.
1) Blockage by cable and dsl providers. They have to stop whispering about what they are crying to the FCC about. Either stand up and let the world know who the culprits are or shut up. If they want to be the states righter for the industry be the bold, outrageous company they started out being. Either that or be the Verizon of VoIP, always playing footsie with the regulators and go along a path of screwing over customers.
2) Churn. They never admit what their churn is.
3) New services. Vonage has not had a feature update in months. Their competition, Broadvoice, VoicePulse and CallVantage all continue to offer more in the way of features and indicate they are adding more.
4) A consistent service experience. I moved my Vonage box to my fiance’s house which means the service now rides on Comcast, not Cox. Instant improvement in call quality. Vonage’s lack of a network architecture of their own, peering agreements and all the rest that impacts QoS means one person’s Vonage is not the same as someone else’s.
There are also reports circulating that Vonage can’t go public with Jeff Citron at the helm. While I’m not an SEC lawyer, I have to wonder how valuable a publicly traded Vonage would be, without their guiding light at the helm. That’s a big issue they need to address, and fast if an IPO is in their future….