Telecom Trends

I have played around with the Vonage dashboard over the past few weeks and I have to say that I like it! One of the real differentiators for VoIP is the ability to manage (and tailor) your phone service to match your requirements.

Last Tuesday, I mentioned that I have set up local numbers in Toronto and the city in which my kids are at school. Adding a new number was as simple as a couple clicks.

Various call forwarding options and simultaneous ringing options are easy to set-up and easy to understand. This allows our kids to call a local number which will ring our house, our cel phones and my office - whichever one answers first wins.

Adding another number in a second free calling area was equally easy and it was activated in seconds.

Call it the dashboard or console, a key success factor is how easy VoIP providers make it for customers to sign-up and stay with you. If the ITSP gets it right, orders don't need to touch humans and help avoid calls into customer service. When operating on razor thin margins, service providers need to get this part right.

It seems to be working well for Vonage, the US market leader. Maybe folks are starting to recognize that the post IPO sell-off went a little too far.

The stock is up almost 50% in the past couple weeks, 30% in the last 3 trading sessions.

I guess I'm not the only one who likes the user console.

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VoIP, Vonage, Mark Goldberg