June 5th, 2006
This week is the official 'Sue VoIP providers week'
In unrelated lawsuits, investors are suing Vonage over an abysmmal intitial public offering (ever notice you can’t say VoIP without the letters IPO) and Net2Phone is suing Skype’s parent eBay for patent infringement. According to CNET News.com’s Marguerite Reardon:
The suit filed on Friday in the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey by the Atlanta-based law firm Motley Rice asserts that the Internet telephony provider, its officers and the IPO’s underwriters misled investors…Vonage’s stock, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange on May 24 at $17 per share, has lost about 30 percent of its value in its first seven days of trading….Vonage had taken the unusual step of offering about 13.5 percent of its IPO shares to customers. The complaint alleges that Vonage’s officers decided to offer shares to customers because they knew institutional investors who normally buy IPOs would be reluctant to buy Vonage stock. Vonage has consistently lost money and has never been profitable.
Separately, News.com’s Dawn Kawamoto reports:
Net2Phone alleges that Skype, a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay, violated its "point-to-point Internet Protocol" patent. The patent calls for the exchange of IP addresses between processing units in order to establish a direct communications link between the devices via the Internet….Skype uses a peer-to-peer technology to operate its VoIP service, whereas companies such as Vonage and AT&T largely use a system that is centrally managed to transfer calls to a traditional phone network.
