I’m moving back to BellSouth. Oops, I mean AT&T. Vonage is going the way of the dodo and I don’t want my home phone to be a part of it.
Vonage: no workaround, we’re pretty much screwed – Engadget:
Vonage had already been granted a temporary stay, saying that they’d drum up a workaround, but this new request is much more pessimistic, saying that because Verizon’s patents are so broad, such technology would take months to develop, “if even feasible.”
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April 17, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Update: Tier 1 research analyst Daniel Berninger points out that it’s actually possible that Verizon’s patents may be illegitimate. Apparently the two patents in question, 6,104,711 (filed March 6, 1997) and 6,282,574 (filed February 24, 2000) may themselves use technology openly discussed and published by VocalTec back in 1996. In fact, it may also indirectly include technology input from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, Intel, Nortel, etc. made during the VoIP Forum in 1996, with the businesses’ original intentions that this tech be used in future open standards. Can anything be proved here that would give Vonage a get out of jail free card? Well, we’re certainly not lawyers (we’ll defer to the legally-inclined in our audience), but already this patent he-said she-said is smacking a bit of RIM and NTP’s fracas, and we all know how ugly that wound up being for the BlackBerry maker.