Vonage Wants to Help You Dig a Hole

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Vonage announced today their plans to offer an 811 service to their subscribers that will offer free information about the safety of digging in a certain area. When a Vonage subscriber calls into the information center via 811, the call center agent takes down the subscribers digging information and forwards it to the local utility company. The local utility companies will then mark the approximate location of their underground utilities, preventing the Vonage subscriber from a variety of headaches. Vonage recommends that you call at least three days prior to beginning any digging to allow for the utility companies to mark the line locations.

I have been quite critical of Vonage lately, but are you serious? Digging information? With all of the marketing talent that has been assembled at Vonage, the best they can come up with is a service that finds out if it is safe for you to dig. I am not the only one who has pointed out a lack of innovation when it comes to new Vonage value-adds, but this newest addition is nothing more then a reason to send out a press release. Do they think that there will be an increase in subscribers because of this service? Will this new service lower their current churn rate? I do not think it will do either.

Maybe this deal has more to do with paying back the utility companies for all of the Vonage inserts that were put in the utility bills.