Back when Vonage had it’s IPO, I was excited about it, thinking it was going to be another Google-type money making IPO. As it turns out, I’m glad I’m not a day-trader.

If you haven’t been following along lately, Vonage has had a bit of trouble. First, they were being sued by Verizon for patent infringement. Next, a judge said that they were guilty of infringing on 3 of Verizon’s patents and ordered to pay a settlement (of around $58M) and was told to stop infring on the patents. There was some seemingly good news for Vonage – they signed a deal with Voiceone that would help them to stop infringing on 2 of the 3 patents. Then Vonage’s CEO stepped down. A few day after that, Vonage was told that they were not allowed to sign-up any new customers until they found a work-around to the patent-infringement issue. Now, just across my desktop scrolled another Vonage-may-die headline “Vonage: No tech ‘workaround’“. So what’s next? I don’t know, I’m just a former customer who has mixed feelings about their service and has remained interested in the company. I know a lot of people who use Vonage and really like the idea of having a VoIP phone and how the service works.

One thing I am unsure of is how all of this will impact some of the other VoIP companies out there like Packet8, SunRocket or even AT&T’s VoIP offering. Maybe it is just my lack of understanding but if Vonage is saying there isn’t another way for them to connect VoIP calls, then wouldn’t that mean the samething regarding the way that all of the other VoIP companies connect VoIP calls? Why would Verizon go after Vonage and not someone much larger (and with deeper pockets) like AT&T?

Edit: I was perusing Digg.com and found this article pointing to a very good blog post from Engadget.com. For even more information, you could visit Wikipedia’s Vonage article, which is much more thorough than this post.

Filed under: Vonage

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