VONAGE GOES FOR IPO?

HatTip to Om. It's definitely now or never. Skype, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, etc. Om's comments:

Multiple sources including The Daily Deal and The Wall Street Journal are reporting that Vonage is about to file for an initial public offering and is hoping to raise between $400 and $600 million. The Daily Deal has the scoop.
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Dual track process? Now that’s interesting! I get a feeling, that it might be a one-track process - IPO because of the greater fool theory - because not many buyers out there who can pay enough money to give investors (read VCs) a decent return on investment.

Lots of questions in my mind, which will hopefully clear up soon. Just doing the numbers - Vonage has raised $400 million, and with $600 million in IPO proceeds, that’s a whopping $1 billion. Not bad for a company that has shade less than a million customers. So investors in the company are tentatively valuing each Vonage customer at about $1000 - or about 40 months of revenues.

I find the timing of this news pretty interesting! There is clearly lots of competition, including cable companies which are just cranking their sales machine and pushing VoIP like crazy. Skype, Yahoo, Microsoft and Google’s Voice-over-IM offerings are going to put some if not a lot of deflationary pressure on the prices. Price pressure is going to be rampant. Good time, to re-read my Telecom Death Spiral essay. And that’s not even taking into account some of the problems incumbents can create for all indy-VoIP people (without risking the ire of FCC, of course!) (full post)