Picks and Pans: No Homage for Vonage

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Internet telephony provider Vonage (NYSE: VG) has had quite a story over its short public life. The massive marketing budget and aggressive expansion campaign colliding with threats of lawsuit sanctions from Verizon (NYSE: VZ) made the company a hot topic at cocktail parties earlier in the year. And although the company has mostly avoided the limelight lately, investors are still buzzing about Vonage.

Motley Fool CAPS is a great resource that lets me see not only who likes or dislikes the stock, but also why. Overall, there's little love in CAPS Land for Vonage, with nearly 1,000 of the 1,200 CAPS players rating the company voting that the stock will underperform the broader market in the future. Vonage's one-star rating (the lowest) hasn't budged for the last six months, as shares have continued to fall and now sit more than 70% lower year to date.

I've been quite vocal with my own opinions of Vonage, and how I see pure-play voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) providers as a classic investment value trap. But as Vonage plummeted on bad legal news and continued cash burning earlier this year, my Foolish friend Tom Taulli and I debated about where the floor is for Vonage's share price, possibly even in a takeover scenario.

It's still hard to image a traditional telco like AT&T (NYSE: T) putting up a few hundred million for Vonage, though. Ditto for cable companies such as Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (NYSE: TWC), which already offer digital phone services. And I don't find expanding into telecom a viable strategy even for cash-rich Internet players such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN).

Actually, few CAPS investors see a bottom for Vonage. Some expect it to go the way of bankruptcy much like competitor SunRocket. Others expect it will have to make changes to its fundamental business model to survive. Even with the stock below $2 and a market value of just below $300 million, few CAPS investors are venturing to make bullish predictions at this point (you can view all investors' comments here).

It looks like even 2.45 million paying subscribers aren't enough to convince the majority of CAPS investors that this story will have a happy ending, so maybe it's time to close this book.

More Foolishness:

• The Death of Traditional Telcos?
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