Rich Tehrani writes a great story with some historical context on how Verizon lost a VoIP patent case (on all 6 patent counts) to Cox Communications. Unfortunately, a bit too late for Vonage which paid millions to settle their patent case with Verizon.

Really though the large telcos are the winners here and consumers are the losers. The US patent system continues to be a barrier to true innovation and consumers are being hurt -- severely so in some cases -- by large companies who use the patent system to prevent other companies from succeeding. Instead of competing with better technology alone, these large companies use large amounts of patents at once to scare new entrants into submission. Hopefully, in the IP communications space, Cox Communications will mark a point in time when large companies slow down their IP communications patent infringement onslaught.

Check out the full story.

According to the Seminole Chronicle, police were befuddled when they responded to a 911 call with a crying baby on the open phone line, only to discover they were at the wrong house. Apparently, the owner is a Vonage customer and moved without notifying Vonage of the change of address to update the E911 records.

The article explains:

Kelly informed Sanford police of the situation. Upon arrival at the family's home, officers confronted a rather confused and embarrassed father who admitted his son had been playing with his cell phone.

They had moved, the father said, and had not bothered to update their phone carrier, Vonage, with their new address.

What I don't get is how the baby dialed 911 using a cell phone that is tied to Vonage's service. Since when did Vonage start offering cell phone service? If 911 was dialed from a cell phone, the tracing of the call should be performed from the wireless carrier not Vonage.

The only thing I can think of is that the father installed some sort of Vonage software on his mobile phone that enables outbound calling through the Vonage service. But if such a piece of software exists, I'm unaware of its existence. The closest thing is Vonage Companion, and that is designed to run on PCs not a mobile phone. I'm more confused over this than the mainstream media was over the Governor Sarah Palin VP pick.

As I predicted on July 3rd, AT&T would soon be dropping its CallVantage broadband VoIP service since they dropped their affiliate marketing channel.

Well, today I learned that AT&T is no longer accepting ANY new orders from ANY source - affiliate or otherwise. The slow death of CallVantage is a bit sad, but it isn't particularly surprising, not only because they dropped the affiliate channel last month but as I have previously indicated, AT&T is heavily promoting their U-Verse fiber-to-copper hybrid service that combines IPTV, data, and U-Verse Voice (in select areas).

It seems a little early to cut the cord on acquiring new Callvantage customers since neither U-Verse or U-Verse Voice are available in most of the country - including my neighborhood where it was promised for this summer. I would think they would want to acquire these customers on CallVantage and then easily port them over to U-Verse when it becomes available in their area. It is much easier and less expensive to retain an existing customer than acquire a new one. But perhaps CallVantage was burning money and wasn't profitable? Unlikely since there isn't a lot of overhead in offering VoIP, especially since AT&T has a vast network they already pay for. My guess is that internal politics played a role more than profitability. It's too bad. Callvantage has some cool features that other broadband VoIP players didn't have. Could be good news for Vonage, Packet8 and the rest - one less single-play provider...

Check out the announcement made on their website:

Thank you for your interest in AT&T CallVantage® service. Currently we are not accepting new orders for AT&T CallVantage service. We will continue to evaluate our AT&T CallVantage service and remain committed to providing leading, next generation voice services for today's consumer and business customers. For information on other AT&T products and service please visit www.att.com

Vonage today launched their VonagePro service, their premium service offering that features a brand new softphone with single phone number identity, built-in contacts support, custom ringtones, and more.

Mary Grikas, Executive Director of Device Development for Vonage about the launch of Vonage Companion told me, "As far as the VoIP landscape goes, we feel strongly and we believe that the future of VoIP is not going just be based on price and bundling. Price our experience has told us, does not equate to loyal customers. Our customers are loyal if we help them communicate and if we offer them feature-rich offerings that fit into their lifestyles. Our product strategy is that everything we do is customer-centric and customer-focus."

She added, "VonagePro currently has about 1000 beta testers. Our marketing team went out and did a study of the prosumer, which is basically the professional consumer. Those are folks who are comfortable with technology, they embrace technology, they want to use technology to make their lives easier."

She continued, "WebEx is an example of that, right? We can have conference calls where we do demos. If you aren't able to make it to the office to see the demo you can still function and work through WebEx. That's an example of a prosumer. Somebody who is comfortable with technology, they're not afraid of it and they want to use it to help make their lives better. VonagePro is a new product offering that includes some new components and some existing components. It includes Vonage DigitalVoice, which is their traditional home landline replacement ($24.99/month unlimited local/long-distance service), Vonage access numbers, SimulRing, and more." VonagePro also includes 25 visual voicemail minutes per month (text-to-speech transcribing of voicemail) and 25 directory assistance calls per month as part of the VonagePro package. The major new component is a new softphone offering that is attached to your home phone number, called Vonage Companion. Mary commented, "That's something that our customers have been asking for a very long time."

Vonage already offered a Vonage softphone called V-Phone, a $9.99/month add-on that includes 500 minutes/month, but it uses a separate phone number from your home number. Vonage Companion is the first softphone offering that allows both your home analog telephony adaptor (ATA) and your softphone to receive phone calls to the same phone number.

The first device to answer the call first grabs the call. Call waiting still works on both the softphone device so on a second inbound call, the one currently on the phone will hear the call waiting tone while the other device rings. Both share the same DID phone number. It also acts as a second line, so for instance if someone is on the phone and you want to order a pizza, you can use Companion to make the outbound call. Further, the CallerID is the same regardless of which device you use to make the call.

I asked if Vonage Companion is an OEM'ed softphone from Counterpath and Vonage confirmed that was the case. One nifty feature in CompanionLink is the ability to set custom ringtones based on contacts. Vonage said some customers use their PC's speakers with custom ringtones as a method of screening callers without having to look at or be near the phone. Another useful feature is the ability to click a single button in Companion to record the call to a .wav file. Companion also lets you drag-and-drop contacts to have an ad-hoc instant conference. On the record, Vonage Companion supports 3 conference participants. Off the record it can support up to 6 conferees, depending on how much your bandwidth allows. Home-based business professionals, especially sales will appreciate the ability to break out one or more callers from within a conference. For example, suppose the customer wants a 20% discount, but you need to talk it over with your manager but not have the customer hear the conversation. You can simply separate all the callers and then using your mouse, simply click on each tab to speak privately to each of the callers. You can then conference them all back in via the Conference All button. Another nice feature of Companion is that contacts go with you based on your logon, so you can take your contacts with you wherever you logon.

I asked, "What sort of technical challenges did you have having the same CallerID and the same phone number? Obviously, you are leveraging SIP and the ATA that sits at the home residence logs on with one set of SIP credentials and Vonage Companion logs on with different SIP credentials, but it's mapped on your back-end to the same phone number."

Mary responded, "That's really a great question because we actually had to put almost a whole new infrastructure in place with a lot of new equipment. And we actually have proxies that are just dedicated to Companion to handle those calls. We do differentiate between the home TA DID credential and we do have flag for Companion. That way we know, as you said on the back-end it's all mapped and then we know where the call originates. We know if a call originates from Companion versus originating from the TA." Mary continued, "That was a lot of work for our call processing team. They had to do a lot of work configuring that system and all the redundancy and mapping. It was a pretty big effort, but it's something we were committed to doing because we had such an overwhelming request from our customers to implement a feature like that.

Companion also supports a mini-skinned mode as seen here:

I asked Vonage, "What were some of the challenges in developing Vonage Companion?"

Mary answered, "One of the challenges was making sure that all the back-end scenarios work seamlessly. For example, if you logon from another location. If you logon and the other instance is NOT on a call, it would automatically logout the other instance, but if the other instance is on a call, we want to present the user with the option - the other user is on a call. Are you sure you want to login at this time? We want to be sure that we cover all the use scenarios properly."

When asked to compare the existing Vonage V-phone offering for $9.99/month versus the new VonagePro for $10/month, Vonage responded, that if they're paying $9.99/month for the softphone service, it's a natural upgrade to VonagePro for an additional penny which adds the 25 TTS visual voicemail, the 25 directory assistance calls, the single phone number, and additional outbound phone line when the phone or Companion is in use.

Check out the spec sheet & the press release after the jump...

Comcast is about to be punished for messing with its customers Internet traffic, including messing with P2P traffic and reportedly even VoIP traffic. Apparently, Comcast making nice nice with Vonage wasn't enough to appease the FCC. This news wire reports that "A majority of members of the Federal Communications Commission have cast votes in favor of punishing Comcast Corp. for blocking subscribers' Internet traffic, an agency official said".

Ouch! Looks like Comcast has finally got their comeuppance!

The future of Vonage is certainly looking brighter. Vonage recently settled patent disputes, including one with Verizon. This week they secured a $215 million financing deal this week from Silver Point Finance LLC. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the company is about to bring in a new CEO to replace founder Jeffrey Citron, though Jeffrey will remain with the company.

Has Vonage turned the corner? Hard to say. What I have noticed is a strong up-tick in the number of times I've seen Vonage ads on the Web. Whether that large online advertising expenditure is bringing in new customers or they're burning too much cash to acquire new customers remains to be seen.

Vonage today announced two new low cost call plans for their Vonage UK subsidiary. According to Vonage UK, "Following customer research and reacting directly to consumer concern about increasing household costs and spiraling business overheads, Vonage has created two new fixed rate call plans."

They added, "Vonage subscribers report enormous savings on their monthly bills and comment on the speed and ease of swapping providers as well as installing Vonage. The new call plans fly in the face of increasing utility prices and the new £6.99 plan has been designed for the high percentage of Vonage consumers requesting more cost efficient plans for North America."

Vonage's £7.99, £14.99 and £18.99 plans incorporating up to 45 countries remain unchanged. The two new call plans offer Vonage's lowest ever rates and are called V-Plan UK and V-Plan US.

• £5.99 per month - unlimited calls to the UK (V-Plan UK)
- Premium features such as call waiting, caller ID, call diversion, voicemail, three way calling (normally billed as extras with other providers), are included as standard.

• £6.99 per month - unlimited calls to the UK, United States and Canada (V-Plan US)
- As above plus, for only £1 extra per month, unlimited calls to the US and Canada to include calls to US and Canadian mobile phones.

Here's a screenshot of the various V-Plan calling options. Click image to see the plans:


Vonage to Vonage calls are free. Also, there are no hidden costs with Vonage - prices are always quoted including VAT.

Vincent Potier, Managing Director of Vonage, said; "We recognise how important it is for customers to keep costs low and as predictable as possible - especially in light of the current economy. Our new plans enable customers to make worry free calls for as long as they want and show our long term commitment to listening and responding to our customers as well as offering the highest level of customer service and value for money".

I missed the 8x8/Packet8 news on July 16th about its new hosted small office "key" system and plug-and-play IP phones. Joan Citelli, Director of Corporate Communications emailed me asking for a briefing, but apparently I never replied since her email was still marked as unread and nothing in my Sent Items. Email overload I guess. The news was about 8x8, working with handset maker Aastra Telecom to provide a key system to the SMB market,which is part of the new Packet8 675xi series.

I happened to come across Carolyn Schuk's article while surfing the web and came across her post about some 8x8 news that I missed. She writes, "8x8 is VoIP's Rodney Dangerfield. It just gets no respect." She has an excellent point and one which I wholeheartedly agree with.

Carolyn then lays out her case: "Consider how it stacks up against its far better-known pure-play VoIP competitor, Vonage: In the last five years, 8x8 revenues grew 460.3 percent while Vonage's grew 0.0 percent. 8x8 made $700,000 during the first quarter of this year. Vonage lost $8.9 million and is shopping for a $215 million refinancing deal to stay out of bankruptcy. 8x8 holds 73 patents. Vonage just got its first. Despite this, Vonage's stock price is $1.58 while 8x8's is $1.03."

She goes on to explain that the news coverage of the new Packet8 675xi series was sorely lacking, which sparked the Rodney Dangerfield comment. I'm guilty as charged, since I didn't cover the news. Though it wasn't for a lack of respect that I didn't cover the Packet8 news. Sometimes it's just impossible to cover all the daily VoIP news in addition to my testing of VoIP products, managing the MIS department as CTO, etc.

Well, better late than never. Today, I thought I'd give an overview of the new Packet8 675xi series, which is actually part of their Packet8 Hosted Key System Services. Perhaps most importantly, this offering supports "call appearances" commonly referred to as "shared line appearances" or SLA, which enables you to know when someone is using a line. It's a popular feature of key systems and one which is often difficult to reproduce on VoIP systems. Supporting SLA is often a key selling advantage when targeting the SMB which is used to call appearance functionality.

First off, the Packet8 675xi IP phone series consists of three models -- the 6753i entry level phone, 6755i intermediate phone and 6757i CT advanced phone. Essentially these are OEM'ed versions of the Aastra 53i, 55i, and 57i CT but with a special firmware load. Each model offers full duplex speakerphone functionality, programmable softkey appearances, LCD display screens, embedded XML browsers and up to nine call appearance lines. All models support Power over Ethernet and come equipped with dual auto-sensing switched Ethernet ports.

Here's pictures of all 3 models:




The Packet8 675xi series include intercom paging and direct dial from a searchable corporate directory. Prices for the Packet8 675xi series range from $129.99 for the 6753i to $349.99 for the high end 6757i CT model which includes a DECT cordless phone as part of the bundled offer. The 6757i CT model's built in DECT antenna allows the user to roam up to a 300 foot radius from the 6757i CT base telephone. The Packet8 675xi IP phones also feature corporate directory display and lookup, intercom paging, and shared line appearance.

The Packet8 675xi series of IP phones incorporates 8x8's advanced NAT traversal technologies. This allows users to simply plug the phone into any Internet connection and immediately make or receive calls without performing any network or firewall configuration.

The high-end Packet8 6757i CT includes an integrated cordless handset with coverage up to 300,000 sq ft. It has a large 144 x 128 pixel graphical backlit LCD display and 6 dynamic context-sensitive softkeys, and with its large screen it can take full advantage of XML based programs.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the Packet8 675xi series use SIP trunking to Packet8's network infrastructure. All of the telephony functions such as transfer, conferencing, voicemail, etc. reside on the Packet8 network. Thus, you don't need any costly IP-PBX hardware at the customer premise - you just need IP phones. This can be a huge cost savings for SMBs looking for an inexpensive VoIP solution, especially as the costs and margins for IP-PBXs continue to shrink with growing price pressure from more competition and open source solutions like Digium's Asterisk.

Packet8/8x8 certainly has earned my admiration with some great products and services, a cool videophone, and more VoIP patents than you can shake a stick at! My 'respect' has been duly given.

I've come across the new ACN IRIS 3000 videophone a few times recently and thought I'd write about them. I'm a big fan of videophones even if there doesn't seem to be any true adoption of industry standards that lets one videophone talk/video to another. Not to mention I reported first how Vonage's OEM'ed videophone, VisiFone, from Viseon hit the scrap heap due to Viseon's implosion. I was hoping to see Vonage's VisiFone interoperate with Packet8's Videophone, which I reviewed back in 2004. Back then Packet8 was the last broadband videophone service provider left standing, but it now appears that ACN has recently jumped onboard the videophone wagon. I hope they do well. Although videophone deployment has been slow to take off, I think offering subsidized, low-cost, or even free videophones to VoIP customers is one way of differentiating yourself from your competitors, especially if you are a single play provider like Vonage or Packet8 going up against Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, etc. that offer Triple Play packages.

If the single play providers were smart, they'd take my advice and make their videophones interoperate. Forget trying to hold your customers hostage by forcing them to stay with your service in order to keep their videophone capabilities. A customer that signs up with ACN and gets the videophone should not only be able to videocall Packet8 videphones, he should also be able to leave ACN, join Packet8's service and continue to use his videophone. With standards such as SIP, H.264, etc. there's absolutely no reason why videophone shouldn't interoperate. Further, with mobile phones increasingly adding more processing horsepower, and embedded cameras, making 2-way video calls from a Windows Mobile phone or Apple iPhone should be quite feasible. It's all about the standards, baby!

This locking of the videophone reminds me of this nugget from my 2006 VoIP Predictions:

VoIP providers will continue to harp that the government shouldn't impose any regulations on VoIP and that the industry should be open & free, while simultaneously VoIP providers will continue to alienate their customers by password-protecting and locking the customer's ATA (analog telephony adaptor), thus preventing customers from easily switching to another VoIP provider and using the same ATA. This is hypocrisy at its worst! Customers will continue to be left with useless ATA "bricks" which eventually will make it the local landfill when they switch to a better VoIP provider.

Analysis: (correct) Unfortunately, more VoIP service providers are still locking their ATAs even though they often charge you a $50 or more cancellation fee if you cancel within 1 year. Often their rational for the cancellation fee is that they give you the hardware for free and therefore since they have to "subsidize" the hardware costs they need to recoup the investment. I say if you are going to charge me $50 to recoup your losses, that's fine, but unlock the damn ATA!

I contacted Huw Rees VP Sales and Marketing for 8x8, Inc. who operate the Packet8 service to get his take on videophone adoption and industry standards.

Huw stated, "Approximately 5% of our residential subscribers are videophone users. Our implementation is standard SIP to the latest RFC, so as long as someone conforms to this standard our phones will interoperate." Huw added, "A good example of this is that we interoperate with Counterpath's soft client. We have recently re-positioned the videophone as a device for use in SMBs rather than just residential and we have seen some significant increase in sales in this segment, but overall the numbers are still fairly small compared to the market for voice services."

5% is more than I thought. I was guessing around 2% customer penetration. So looks like 8x8/Packet8 has made some in-roads. Glad to heard they're targeting the SMBs with their videophone product. Since Packet8's videophone is standards-based as others adopt industry standards this will only help the videophone market.

In any event, ACN's IRIS 3000 Videophone features a large 7-inch digital screen, a light-adjusting camera sensor, digital photo frame for displaying photos, downloadable ringtones, and built-in videomail. It also supports DECT 6.0 Uniden cordless phones and the ability to get news, weather, sports, and other online content. According to their promo video you can also hook up Homeplug Turbo 85Mbps adaptors to your home phone lines to enable multiple IRIS 3000 videophones around your house.

The videophone itself is free. Yeah, you read that right. Of course, you have to sign up with ACN's broadband VoIP service with a two-year committment, but it features unlimited calling to the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico. Not a bad deal. They also offer a pro-rated cancellation fee that goes progressively lower if you terminate early.

The IRIS 3000 converts to a Digital Photo Frame when not in use and includes a built-in phone adapter to connect other analog phones to your digital phone service. It also sports video outputs so images from the video phone can be projected onto a larger screen such as a computer or TV. The Video Phone lets you leave VideoMail for family or friends that also own a ACN IRIS 3000 videophone.

They also offer Family Plan Lines which offers discounted video phone lines to your family and friends. Also, you can VoIP or video talk to anyone on ACN's network with no long distance charges.

Features

• Unlimited calling throughout U.S. (including Hawaii), Canada & Puerto Rico
• Video communication
• 7", high-resolution digital screen
• Digital Photo Frame feature when not in use
• Auto-light sensor
• Traditional calling features: Call Waiting, Caller ID & Call Forwarding, 911 Dialing and more
• Enhanced Phonebook

Cool features - now if only more VoIP service providers offered free videophones that inter-operated with other service providers, then life would be good.

Finally, check out the promo video for the ACN IRIS 3000. Donald Trump makes a quick appearance, apparently as an ACN IRIS 3000 videophone user. Wonder if he signed off on that endorsement?

According to eFluxMedia, Comcast is "working on rehabilitating its name and implementing reasonable management techniques through a new partnership with VoIP service provider Vonage." Vonage and Comcast said they will work on ensuring adequate management techniques to avoid network congestion to ensure high quality VoIP services.

I should point out that Comcast tarnished their own reputation when they intentionally degraded P2P traffic, particularly Bittorrent, a heavy bandwidth application. According to a 36 page thread on the Vonage Forums that dates back to 2006, Comcast was accused of degrading Vonage's voice over IP quality intentionally. Comcat has denied these charges, but many Comcast users that have Vonage have had issues.

Whether conspiracy or not, now Vonage and Comcast stated they will have a "direct line of communications" between their network operations centers to resolve customer issues. Umm, so they couldn't talk to each other easily before, so now they need a special 'bat phone' direct hotline?

According to the Free Press, Marvin Ammori, general counsel of Free Press and author of the complaint, issued the following statement:

"We are baffled as to why it was necessary for Vonage to strike a network management agreement with Comcast to guarantee that their services are not degraded or blocked. Such anti-competitive, anti-consumer practices are already against the law. And beyond that, Comcast has been on the record as saying that they do nothing to deter their customers' use of VoIP.

"This announcement calls into question the company's honesty about its treatment of competing services. Was Comcast degrading Vonage's VoIP service before this announcement? And are they continuing to degrade other services that compete with their products? That these questions remain unanswered by today's announcement is cause for great concern. This collaboration should do nothing to deter the FCC from investigating and stopping Comcast's blocking other Internet services."

The partnership with Vonage is supposedly part of Comcast's commitment to move to a protocol-agnostic network management approach by the end of 2008. Comcast has announced collaboration with Pando Networks for a "P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities" (BRR) and participation in the P4P Working Group organized by the Distributed Computing Industry Association.

It all sounds well & good, but we'll see if Comcast lives up to their word to play fair and not mess with IP packets. I for one am not holding my breath.