Vonage to get new CEO
Internet phone company Vonage will name a new chief executive as early as next week, according to a story published in The Wall Street Journal Friday.
The newspaper cited people familiar with the situation. The news comes as Vonage secures funding to buy back some of its debt. On Thursday the company said it has a letter of commitment from the hedge fund Silver Point Finance to provide up to $215 million in private debt financing.
Vonage will use the cash, plus some of its own, to repurchase the remainder of its $253 million in convertible notes, the Journal story said. Vonage needed to raise money for the repurchase by December 16 or risk bankruptcy, according to the article.
Jeffrey Citron, who founded Vonage and stepped down as head of the company in early 2006, returned as interim CEO in April 2007. Over the past year, Citron has helped guide the company through a series of patent disputes and worries of bankruptcy.
Now that Vonage has settled its legal disputes and it's regained its financial footing, Citron is looking for someone else to take over the day-to-day management of the company, the story said.
But even with a new chief executive in charge, Vonage still faces many challenges. The company, which pioneered the Internet telephony market, faces stiff competition from cable operators now offering phone service as well as the phone companies themselves who sell cellular services that can also be used as wired phone replacements.
Marguerite Reardon has been a CNET News reporter since 2004, covering cell phone services, broadband, citywide Wi-Fi, the Net neutrality debate, as well as the ongoing consolidation of the phone companies. E-mail Maggie.
I wonder what has been the Vonage's failure. I've known plenty of people who have a positive impression of the service. I've used it at friends'. But I think Vonage's weakest point is their customer service. That's where most of the complaints come from.
After the first 18 months of having their service, Vonage started getting sued for patent infringements for which they had to pay loads of money and come up with their own technology. Thats when the service problems started and many faithful customers started to bail -including myself-. The service became completely unreliable, our fax line would not work at all, our phone line was non-existent. Vonage changed routers and trouble shoot our service every week. I got tired of hassling with the crappy service, canceled it, and switched to cell phones only.
I keep getting calls from Comcast (my 16mb internet and video provider) to add their VOIP solution, but they cannot match the price or the features of Vonage (my favorite being SimulRing to ring my home phone and up to 5 other lines at the same time for an incoming call).
As a System Administrator, I have helped many people with VOIP issues (Vonage and others) and in 99.99% of the cases, voice quality issues were attributed to inadequate internet connectivity speeds or quality of connection (lost packets). In my opinion, Comcast and other cable companies are not having as many issues as their bandwidth tends to be higher than those with the most minimally basic DSL speeds. They (ISPs) can also diagnose their own equipment better than Vonage since they can directly troubleshoot the network issues to their own modems.
Every struggling company has issues and I hope that Vonage can continue, but since they can't fix everyone's internet connectivity speed and/or quality issues, I fear that the negative momentum will continue to drag them down.
I hate paying more for fewer features, but that is what my cable provider offers. I tell them that every time they call me, but they simply say that they don't offer those features or price and say goodbye. They don't even seem to care to add more features to compete for my business--I guess they figure they'll just wait until I don't have a choice other than to use their featureless, more expensive version. Sigh..