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Vonage Allowed to Sign New Customers
terrymr writes "The Court of Appeals for the federal circuit has stayed the injunction against Vonage pending their appeal." The appeals judge agreed with Vonage's argument that the amount of consumer churn that Vonage or any telco suffers from would surely mean disaster for their bottom line, were they denied an influx of new customers.
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me now?
Bad lines - not just for cell phones anymore!
Just in case Vonage goes under, I've got this Vtech modem for Vonage that works with a couple of those portable phones.
How much rocket science will it take to make this work with other VoIP setups... uh, before Verizon's lawyers go after them, too?
Woo hoo hoo
Let them sign up all the new customers they want, as long as they reveal how I can expunge that damned jingle from my brain.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
On the one hand, Verizon with an idiot patent.
On the other, Vonage thinks customers just naturally leave at random and not because they might be unhappy with their service.
How many people are going to sign up knowing there is a possibility that Vonage will go tits up in the near future?
They're toast.
I'm glad to see that Vonage can start to resell services. It's a shame that the technology behind it gets wrapped up in patents and court cases. I guess I'm too much of an open source, let me fix it kinda guy to understand why certain patents are given to companies in the technology world. I have used Vonage in the past and it's not a bad system. Yea it has kinks. But we are forging forward to the day where there are not hard lines and cellphone. this type of technology should be owned by just one company. ..Maybe companies need to go back to kindergarten and learn how to share.
some people are a "glass half empty" some are "glass half full" i'm a "there is something in the glass be happy" person
The appeals judge agreed with Vonage's argument that the amount of consumer churn that Vonage or any telco suffers from would surely mean disaster for their bottom line, were they denied an influx of new customers.
... if they offered good enough service to actually have some customer loyalty and not spend all their days chasing around the customers from provider to provider, looking for someone that won't give them the shaft. If you have that much turnover with your customers that you are slamming them with like $350 "early termination fees" just to hang onto them, maybe it's time to review your customer satisfaction levels? Use good customer service and a quality product to keep your customers? What a novel concept!
They should have not gotten the stay. It would have been a good lesson for them to actually do something to keep their customers, besides raping their phonebill if they leave. If I were the judge I would have said OK you can sign on new customers again, but for now we are capping your early termination fee at $20. That wouldn't put them out of business but would make them clean up their act, and isn't that what the judge is supposed to be making happen?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Wait, are you the guy in this story by any chance?
Haven't you learned your lesson yet?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Zestfully clean, you're not fully clean unless you're Zest-fully clean.
These things run through my consciousness without my permission. They've invaded my brain via the commercial mass-media during my childhood and adolescence. They are inescapable and pernicious. I'd like to buy the world a Coke.
Go ahead, tell me you've been raised in America and you don't have a corporate media advertising slogan running through the back of your mind now and then. Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I've been thinking about signing up with Vonage for a while now, but just haven't gotten around to it.
When I heard about the injunction, I went right over and signed up, since I figured it would be a few hours until it went into effect, even if it didn't get stayed (which it soon did).
If Vonage goes out of business, it'll take a while. And I can always switch to my cable company's VOIP. I had been dithering b/c my cable's VOIP is twice as expensive, but it's supposed to be better quality (since they use a separate channel for voice instead of competing with the other traffic).
-Esme
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Fundamentally, I don't even see why I'm still stuck paying a phone bill at all. I don't pay an email bill or a filesharing bill.
So, you were hoping that people would know how to reach you by dialing your IP address, perhaps? Who do you think maintains the ability to route calls, from both VoIP and 'analog' networks/carriers, to the number that's assigned to you? Should they be doing that as charity? Do you pay for the IP address you're using? A phone number is pretty much the same thing, only static. I'm guessing your home IP address is probably dynamic, as far as that goes.
Ever use your VoIP service to call a local business that's on POTS? Who do you think bridges that connection, the tooth fairy? And if you've got a technical solution for that process that doesn't cost anything or use any infrastructure, why aren't you sharing that with the rest of the billions of people with hard phone numbers?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I've been using a different VOIP provider since before Vonage existed. Do I have any reason to care about this at all?
I gotta say I don't understand all these complaints about Vonage customer service (although I am not a shareholder, I can imagine they are hugely unhappy). I've been reasonably bleeding edge telecom wise, was in Verizon's DSL trial, was an early Vonage user and then went to Australia and used it from there. Do you know how hard it is to make VoIP work with Telstra? And you have huge latency on top of that. The Vonage tech guys were very patient and very persistent in getting it to work. And it did work very well. Nothing like having a 212 number that rings in Sydney. Now it may have gotten worse with growth, I will grant that. But early on the service was very good.
Every once in a while someone will call into a radio talk show using a really crappy VoIP connection (Sympathetico base service, in most cases, with really lousy upload speed). They sound like they're talking from the bottom of a well with their head in a metal garbage can. Of course, their download speed is good enough that they can hear you, so they go "Must be your phone - I can hear you fine!"