Credit Ike Elliott, who used to be a ranking executive at Level3, for coming up with this one about Vonage and their on-going patent woes.
Ike makes some good points about why Vonage, now owning DPL’s patents, are at least in a slightly better position than they were before.
I am not at all surprised at this because all along I’ve said Vonage had very little, if any technology of their own in their network…..This just further supports my feelings.
Then just after composing this, I read Tom Keating’s alert about an outage that seems to be affecting a good number of their customers. After paging through a few pages of the Vonage-Forum that Tom linked to, this is not a minor issue, and looking at some of the comments, it seems Vonage really hasn’t done much to bolster user confidence around this or other customer service related matters. They continue to have the approach of sign up as many new customers as they can, then if a problem arises and the customer leaves, who cares.
Thanks for the credit, Andy, but I first learned about it from Moshe Maeir’s “Flat Planet and a Phone” blog. Moshe was worried that the big guys are picking on Vonage again, but in this case, Vonage sued Nortel first, so they’ve “got it coming”. At least Vonage is starting to be proactive on the intellectual property issue.
Ike
http://www.ikeelliott.com