Fortune on Vonage

Fortune has a nice piece on Vonage and CEO and founder Jeffery Citron. While Citron has a somewhat spotted past (a slight SEC issue) you can’t question the man’s prior success with Island and Datek which lend some good credibility to his ability to lead a company. The trick though is that the game of telecom has ruthlessly locked out newcomers though Citron is pushing to bust through and might just do that if he can move fast enough.

As has been widely discussed, Vonage chose the fast track to get service to market instead of taking a somewhat more conservative track lining up service level agreements with providers like Level 3. Vonage instead choose Global Crossing which works, though has issues at times (have you heard the flicker?) where apparently competitors like A&TT and Packet 8 amongst others do not.

Now in some seriously competitive waters, I hope that in addition to the marketing budget they consider some service upgrades as well so that does not become an issue of comparison by which others like ATT might judge. Phone wars are notoriously nasty and it’s only a matter of time until Vonage gets put down for a lesser service and no matter how many wifi capable phones they offer, people are going to want reliability when they opt to leave the old way behind. It’s not going to hurt to take a serious look at how they are spending to acquire customers as well.