September 25th, 2007
Vonage Loses Another Patent Case
By Michael Santo
Executive Editor, RealTechNews
In a repeat of their loss in a similar case to Verizon earlier this year, a federal jury has concluded that Vonage has been in violation of seven patents held by Sprint Nextel.
The financial burden of this ruling could be dramatic. Sprint Nextel was awarded $69.5 million in damages—as of today, that represents over a third of Vonage’s entire market capitalization. But the bad news doesn’t end there, as Sprint was also awarded a five percent royalty on all future Vonage revenues. That will undoubtedly be painful for a company that has lost money throughout its existence, and currently only has enough cash on hand to go for about a year at its current loss rate. Source: Ars Technica
We Say: If you are a Vonage customer, I’d at least start looking into a different service, if I were you.
Jake says:
I lived through the wild west days of trying to get lower cost telecom services with competitive local exchange companies and was burned badly. Now I feel like this is a déjà vu – as I have Vonage service . I am tired of going with service providers who are either not well funded or in this case not well endowed with technology that is actually their own. The alternatives seem to be limited as many other providers are small or going under (just look at Sunrocket). I hear there are some good providers that are stable because they are well funded, e.g. Net2Phone, but I am very gun shy. What a mess!
October 6th, 2007 at 12:12 pm