Vonage still has problems, we just no longer track them. The Vonage stock value has plummeted to somewhere south of $1 most of the time, which means we predict they will drop off the NYSE pretty soon. Then they become pretty much road kill. Here’s another interesting insight on the company. Some years ago it took them 3 months (see below) to move my existing number from Qwest to Vonage. During that time the phone number was dead – it went nowhere. That was a business line – you don’t to that to a business line, ever. I billed them for the lost business. About $20,000. They never paid me.

Now I want to move my number from Vonage to Verizon FIOS. Guess what? Vonage won’t let you do that. To move my phone to Verizon FIOS, Vonage blocks my number and won’t let me transfer it. If you want to leave Verizon FIOS, that’s not a problem. they will let me move my number out. Since Vonage won’t, that means my business will need a new phone number. It also means I will need to hold onto that Vonage line for a few months until all customers and friends are moved to the new number. I have to edit the phone number on hundreds of my web pages. I have to reprint business cards for three businesses. The transfer cost for this will be about $1000 probably. but it should be done because I think Vonage will disappear soon. Incidentally, Bush and Company (SEC and FTC) have done nothing to stop their practices.

If you are currently using Vonage and wish to change, I would suggest you put your Vonage account on a separate credit card. This is what I have done. Then when you turn Vonage off you also turn the credit card off. Some people have told me that Vonage keeps billing them after they turn Vonage off. Don’t expect to get that money back.

Now that I’m switching everything to Verizon FIOS, I have to change my phone number on my business cards and several hundred web pages. I doubt if Vonage will pay for that. The SEC under Bush should have fined them and stopped their practices. But then, the failed Administration did nothing. Neither did the Administrative’s SEC do anything with Madoff. I’m glad God will judge the Administrative leaders. Congress certainly didn’t.

Vonage went IPO last week. The initial offering was $17 a share. By the end of the day it had dropped 12.6% to $14.85. This was the worst first-day drop for any IPO this year. James DeStefano, and IPO analyst, believed the drop to be caused by a focus by investors on their long term business model – heavy advertising spending to get customers. Vonage is not earning a profit at the current time and doesn’t expect that to change soon. At the same time, competition is increasing. Could it really be a lack of morals and ethics in their customer relationships?

We are getting several emails from people that say they have had the same experience with Vonage we have. Here is one from Charlotte, NC from Edward and included with his permission:

Charlotte, NC 28211

comments: I have the same problem with Vonage and Bell South. Both are pointing fingers. It has been over two months. I appreciate your webpage. I was able to file form 475 for what that is worth. Vonage is great once it works but if you have a problem… Yeowza… Did you ever get yours to work?
—————————————————————————————–
(Yes, ours works now but we had a dead phone for just under 2 months.)

The problems Vonage is having with its customers are increasing. Back in November of 2005 when we first reported our problem with Vonage a Google search on vonage +support +blog returned 297,000 pages. A search on the same term in Google today returns 609,000 pages – more than doubling in about 4 months. Vonage is going down the tube faster than a bobsled at the Olympics. Instead of pouring more money at those Yahoo ads, they should be putting money into fixing their problems. And the fact that Vonage can cut off your phone for almost two months not compensate you makes me believe that Vonage seems oblivious to any ethical or moral values in selling a product that appears to be failing.
More

For getting high traffic, web sites and blogs involve different strategies.

If you are using a web site to sell your ideas, visions, or services you will probably find that most people find your site using the search engines. This means positioning well in the engines on your relevant keywords. This positioning, at least in Google, is primarily controlled by the number of links from quality and relevant sites into your pages. Your basic strategy for high traffic, if your site is designed properly, is to build up these links coming in naturally over a period of time. Our SEO book can give you good strategies for that.

For using a blog, the strategy is different. Your goal is to build a blog swarm, or creating energy in a number of related blogs, that point to your blogs postings or web pages. A blog posting can link to your web pages or another posting or your web pages can link to a posting. The blog has to be dynamic, be edgy (to invite comments). In addition, you have to go out to related blogs and build energy on your topic there. Our blogging book details the strategy here.

Don’t expect to see a high PageRank on a page your blog points to or many other blogs point to it, but do expect to see a lot of traffic. If you have your blog properly installed, when you update it the blog “pings” the blog directories, letting everyone know you’ve updated your blog. Moreover, people can subscribe to your blog and get your updatings. All of this is automatic and dynamic. When you blog, information gets to interested users quickly. Updating a web page means a user gets it on a result page after Google has indexed it again – which can take days or months.

Let’s take an example. We put a page on our web site about some major problems we see with Vonage. Next, we searched on Google for blogs on related topics using phrases such as vonage +”customer support”+ +blog. Next, we uses the returned results to find blogs discussing vonage problems and entered our comments as a part of their discussion, with a link to our page in each comment. We kept going – must have gone to over a hundred blogs and commented. As a result, there is a swarm and the Vonage page on our site is one of our most popular pages. It really doesn’t have any PageRank, as it is almost a gateway page. Yet it has high traffic. There is a caution here. Blog comments should be related to the topic for which they are posted. If you do anything else, it’s consider blog spam

Misses

VOiP – Vonage lost a big lead by spending for advertising instead of service improvement and endorsing as a company to a very unethical set of core values. See vonageproblem.htm.

The Government – Both Executive and Administrative branches rolled over and died. They, like Vonage, were driven by unethical values and money. Congress votes 223 million to build a bridge to nowhere in Alaska. (Read the full article. Congress didn’t vote to build the bridge, but rather voted to give them the money to do it. The Washington Post title is misleading. That doesn’t save anyone’s political neck.) At the same time, Congress can’t build extra lanes for congested Interstates in Oregon. Both of my senators and my representative voted for the bridge to nowhere. Maybe they should move to Alaska. And Bush has a long, long, long list of misses. The Republican party has died.

The Search Engines – CNN advertising, which is driven from Yahoo, leads their advertising with ads for a company that has poor ethics. So they make lots of money for the advertisement; but who wants to advertise with Yahoo when you can’t trust their advertisements? We are pulling our own ads with them.

e-Commerce – currently protects the seller but not the consumer.

Spam – Our spam load continues to increase, even with filters on the host and our own system. The latest is some joker with a site selling watches with a whole colledtion of different domain names making it difficult to block him. The FTC, of course isn’t doing anything with the blokes. In Germany they find them $65,000 a spam. Who will you vote for next fall?

My Motorola cell phone went dead three times this year. I’m on my third phone. The last time it failed all I had to do was reboot (does Microsoft own Motorola?), but the cell phone didn’t tell me that. After it didn’t ring for a few days, a support store showed me how to reboot and find the 12 lost messages that had been left.

Broadband is overpriced. New Orleans is leading the way with free WiFi, but other cities are afraid of the broadband companies and not offering any free WiFI – including my own city of Portland, Oregon.

HDTV – Most of the HDTVs sold now are not really high resolution. The display is tricked down to the lower resolution, more like a DVD quality. It still looks great, but you aren’t getting all the pixels.

Hits

VOiP – If you avoid Vonage, you can save about 30% on your telephone by going to VOiP. There are almost no surcharges and long distance is often free.

With the Government non-functioning, thanks to someone that imported Venezuela gas and was selling it in New Orleans at about 33% of the current retail price. What does this tell you about the oil companies and President Bush? And thanks to many, many people, organizations, and corporations that did take responsibility in helping the people on the Gulf Coast during the Katrina disaster.

Search Engines – In the search engine war between Google, Yahoo, and MSN – the consumer will win. Most people trust the organic (free) listings. Why pay for advertising and compete with unethical companies?

e-Commerce passed the 30 billion mark in sales over the Christmas holidays. That’s a 30% increase from last year.

Stopping SPAM – We load the spamming domains and IPs to an online and uncopyrighted database on one of our web sites at http://www.creatingnewworlds.org/stopspam.cfm. We invite hackers to lanuch viruses, trojans, and DoS at the IPs and domains, destroying them. This has gotten to be a very popular page (PageRank=4) and gets lots of hits. One guy threated to sue, but we sent copies of his email (which violated the CAN-SPAM) to his state attorney general. We haven’t heard from him any more.

My blogs have doubled the traffic on my web sites that last month. There are over 19 million blogs out there now.

HDTV – Some of the newer HDTV sets and a few of the leading HDTV manufacturers (Toshiba is one) use a new and special chip in their televisions that gets the promised HDTV resolution. Be wise if you are purchasing HDTV. Find out who is using the chip and then make your purchase as a wise buyer.

Vonage dropped our business number when transferring our carrier to them from Qwest back in June and we were without our business number until August 12. This was filed with the FCC. We won’t bore you here with more about this, but if you are interested in the actual results of this from the FCC, here are the current reports:

http://www.netadventures.biz/vonageproblem.htm

As you might guess, Vonage says the fault is Qwest’s. Qwest says it is the fault of Vonage. FCC, which has authority and accountability for making sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen, isn’t doing anything (FCC is part of the Emperor has no Clothes Administration).
These reports and this page are not copyrighted. Feel free to copy the page or create links to it. I’d love to see a blog swarm on this. I want this page out of the noise level so we can get on to our real business.

Vonage restored our business number 503 697-4773 on August 11, one week shy of 2 months we were withosut our business line. During that time an expensive DEX yellow page ad and some 375 web pages pointed to a dead line. We have filed a billing with Vonage for about $8,000 for the lost business, our time, and other detail variable associated with the problem that they caused. The FCC is the official arbitrator in such situations, and they have had our claim for the 30-45 days they require for resolution. No resolution yet. FCC tells us to wait one more week. That means more interest for Vonage to pay.

Both Vonage and Qwest have serious support problems. They can destroy your business. Enjoy the fun and blog these problems to the A-List blogs. Let’s get a swarm going.

Here are the page counts in Google today for these problems. Search on:
vonage +support +blog 127,000 pages
qwest +support +blog 78,500 pages

For more information, see our log of our problem in the certified letter we sent to Vonage at:
http://www.netadventures.biz/vonage.htm

For the A-List blogs, here is a short list:

The Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/
Eschaton http://atrios.blogspot.com/
Instapundit.com http://www.instapundit.com
Hugh Hewitt http://www.hughhewitt.com
Captain’s Quarters http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/
PowerLine http://www.powerlineblog.com/

Our own business site for email is at http://www.netadventures.biz.

Tip for the Wise: Don’t go Vonage. Their customer support is the worse of any company of which I have used products or service. They, with Qwest, have mangled our business telephone number to such a point that I can’t use it – the number is in limbo somewhere and has been in limbo land for 4 weeks.

To reach us now, use an alternate number at 503-952-6045.

Check it out vonage customer support by googling vonage +support +blog. I get 127,000 hits. If I were their CEO, I’d stop the ads until the support problem is fixed. What they have now exposes them to a LOT of liabilities.