Last time we checked in with the primary VoIP provider we’ve used almost two years now, Vonage, they had just dialed in 250 million in funding and today’s news has them cobbling together an IPO for — surprise, surprise — 250 million. Much less than anticipated. IPO details.

Surprising to me the last time this came up, Vonage has had profitablity problems. Mark Evans points out Vonage financial woes:

For the nine months ended Sept. 30, 2005, the company posted a loss of $189.4-million on sales of $174-million. This includes $176.2-million of spending on marketing (that accounts for all those online banner ads) and $98-million SG&A. You have to wonder how much of an appetite there will be among investors for a company posting huge losses in a competitive marketplace? If Vonage manages to sell the IPO, Citron looks to make out like a bandit.

I got chided a bit by one of the Search Champs attendees because he said we’d be in trouble if the power went out. Of course, we run our equipment with backup UPS and still have cell phones which this person didn’t know. We don’t care for the local phone company and would be more than happy to choose anybody else but they have a monopoly in our area, so we’ve cut them out as much as possible — saving a lot of money for our small business — only keeping a couple business lines. Our phone lines are 75% VoIP (Vonage and Skype), 10% cellular (OnStar / Verizon), 15% traditional phone lines.

Yes there have been times that VoIP phone quality has been suspect and I’ve wondered if we were sailing aboard the VoIP Titanic — but even with the power outages we’ve experienced, we haven’t had a situation yet where we wished we had a traditional phone line. Next month will mark the two year mark for us primarily using VoIP in home and business.

How many readers have thrown out the traditional telco, at least partly in favor of VoIP? Your experiences good/bad/indifferent? If you haven’t bought into VoIP why not? Is it fear of losing your number? They do promise portability, but it seems very limited. Do you use cell phones for everything instead? We know a few folks who dumped the telco for cell service.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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• Vonage dials up $250 million more of VC funding
• Loren looking for firsthand Vonage experiences
• Vonage stock goes under $5 as jury deliberates Verizon patent suit
• Is Skype going backwards with pay-per-minute billing?
• Vonage adding 25,000 lines and 5 million plus calls per month
• Comparatively, how big is Vonage in VoIP space?