Vonage Being Sued...Again!

How much more of this can Vonage take? Earlier this month Vonage settled a patent suit filed by Sprint Nextel. That agreement is valued at $80 million. Vonage is currently seeking a review of a U.S. court verdict related to a patent infringement filed by Verizon where Vonage was ordered to pay $58 million. To add to their woes, on Friday Vonage stated in a filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, that AT&T is seeking injunctive relief, compensatory and treble damages and attorneys' fees in unspecified amounts.

The text below is from the abstract of the AT&T patent in question. It seems to me that the abstract describes virtually all VoIP systems; not just Vonage’s. I’m continually amazed at how ambiguous patents can be. I think I’ll file a patent for ToIP (Telepathy Over IP). Someday, someone will create a money making service based on the concept and when they do, I’ll sue their butts!

A packet telephone system which employs a packet network that provides virtual circuits. The packet telephone system employs short packets containing compressed speech. The use of the short packets makes possible compression and decompression times and bounded delays in the virtual circuits which are together short enough to permit toll-quality telephone service.

The packet telephone system employs an intelligent network interface unit to interface between the packet network and standard telephone devices. The network interface unit does the speech compression and decompression and also responds to control packets from the packet network. Consequently, many telephone system features can be implemented in the network interface unit instead of in the switches.

The network interface unit may also be used to provide data connections to devices attached to it. The combination of virtual circuits, with bounded delays, short packets, rapid compression and decompression, and intelligent network interface units makes it possible to build a telephone system with fewer and cheaper switches and fewer links for a given volume of traffic than heretofore possible and also permits substantial savings in provisioning and maintaining the system.

Rick McCharles
Telecom Consultant, Toronto