The lawsuit filed by Verizon Communications against Vonage will not have a chilling effect on the overall Internet voice industry, said Lisa Hook, chief executive of Vonage competitor SunRocket.
Speaking at the Red Herring East 2006 conference in Cambridge on Wednesday, Ms. Hook said that Vonage, a VoIP pioneer, built a lot of its technology from scratch, but one-year-old SunRocket built its technology mainly from off-the-shelf pieces.
“I feel very comfortable that the vendors of our technology pieces have worked out those legal issues,” said Ms. Hook. “Anyone can file a lawsuit, but I am comfortable with our legal position regarding our technology.”
It is one of the risks of being a first mover, she said, although there are many counterbalancing rewards to being first.
Ms. Hook’s comments came on the same day Vonage was expected to make a play for business and other travelers with a new USB device that allows users to make phone calls from their computers while away from home.
Traveling Device
The keychain device allows users to decouple their Vonage usage from their home broadband connection. According to published reports, the V-phone device will cost $40 and will be available this week.
Vonage, a pioneer in the consumer VoIP world, is extending its market reach at a time when the company is facing a major legal issue.
Last week Vonage announced it had been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit by Verizon, the second-largest telecommunications carrier in the United States (see Vonage Sued over Patents).
The lawsuit charges Vonage with infringing seven Verizon patents, all related to key features of Vonage’s commercial service.
The suit charges that Vonage infringed patents related to completing calls between VoIP users and the public network, authenticating VoIP callers, validating VoIP callers’ accounts, monitoring the usage of the VoIP caller, fraud protection, providing enhanced features, and using Wi-Fi phones with VoIP.
In a terse statement, Vonage, which became a public company in May, said it “believes that its services have been developed with its own proprietary technology and technology licensed from third parties.”
More Problems
The suit, filed two weeks ago in a U.S. District Court in Virginia, addresses a number of areas where the VoIP application intersects with the public switched telephone network.
Vonage is also being sued by shareholders after a very disappointing IPO, which came after years of speculation about its timing. The shareholder suits accuse Vonage of allegedly engineering artificial demand for its stock and thus misleading its Vonage customers into buying shares (see Vonage's Poor IPO Faces Suit).
Contact the writer:CMedford@RedHerring.com