Vonage Adds More Nations

Kudo's to Tom Keating for one I missed last week. Vonage added unlimited calling to France, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK.

This is good news for ex-pats families, but I don't see how it increases the bottom line unless Vonage begins out reach campaigns to those who need to call Europe more. And since those who need to already know how to use Skype and Gizmo, and with Yahoo Messenger and AOL adding real voice, one has to wonder if International calling is really just another area code at this point.

Over a year or more ago I commented here on the idea of the global telco brand when AT&T got into the sponsorship of Formular One racing. I still think that day is coming, but it will be the online service providers like Skype, Yahoo, AOL and MSN who lead that charge along with the mobile operators who are basically already there.

Comments

[Aswath]

In my opinion, this is a non-event. Since SkypeOut rates for these countries are the same as that for continental US. So it reasons that it should be the same for Vonage as well. If your business model is unlimited calling, you might as well extend to those other countries and get a catchy line in the ads. We shouldn't forget that unlimited calling has a huge markup that may not be appropriate for many because they do not consume the "modeled" amount of resources.