http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070308/ap_on_bi_ge/vonage_verizon

Sad say for VOIP if Verizon wins.

I hadn't heard about this one but it doesn't surprise me. Vonage has always struck me as a seat of their pants operation. Said operations often make really stupid mistakes.... like not vetting their tech for patent infringement. The Bells have been around forever. It's obvious, to me at least, that they hold pretty much every patent possible for interfacing between various networks, especially those that carry voice. Hell, more than half the LD voice traffic in the US has lived as VoIP at some point along the way... regardless of the endpoint.... for years. That alone tells me that the Bells have been doing this for a while.

While it's sad for Vonage, I don't see this as a threat to VoIP.


What will be bad for all of us is if the telcos get their way and kill Net Neutrality. That will directly impact the quality of service that providers like Vonage can deliver and the cost at which they can deliver them and it won't be a positive impact.

Vonage rocks my world. I am living here in Norway with a US 800 number-- what is not to like?

I wonder how frivolous (or not) these patents are. Working in IT, we are dealing with a competitor that claims to have two patents pending on a generic technology. We might end up claiming prior art, since our solution has been around longer than theirs, and we deemed it to have no patentable elements. If I recall, someone had even patented the very concept of VOIP. Only in America-- literally.