Vonage Allowed to Sign New Customers

terrymr writes "The Court of Appeals for the federal circuit has stayed the injunction against Vonage pending their appeal." The appeals judge agreed with Vonage's argument that the amount of consumer churn that Vonage or any telco suffers from would surely mean disaster for their bottom line, were they denied an influx of new customers.

Of course, it STILL depends on your net connection

[tomhudson]

Got a lousy ISP?

Can you hear me?

Can you hear me now?

Bad lines - not just for cell phones anymore!

Ain't Gonna Help

[The Dobber]

How many people are going to sign up knowing there is a possibility that Vonage will go tits up in the near future?

They're toast.

Re:Ain't Gonna Help

[Anonymous Coward]

How many people know that Vonage is in trouble? A handful of internet tech news readers only, I would wager...

Re:Ain't Gonna Help

[jambarama]

How many people are going to sign up knowing there is a possibility that Vonage will go *** up in the near future?

I can answer that. All of the people who don't know about the patent issues. Like my parents and most of my friends. I took a brief unscientific poll of the dozen people around me. About 3/4ths knew what VOIP was, and of those most knew Vonage. And of everyone, no one had heard of the patent dispute with Verizon.

I think we often overestimate how much the general public knows/cares about this stuff.

Re:Ain't Gonna Help

[timeOday]

Well, personally I do care. I dropped my landline for Vonage a couple years ago, and I'm happy enough. I couldn't speak to their customer service as I've never tried to use it, but the actual phone service seems fine enough to me. Granted, Vonage hasn't been very dynamic about introducing new features to keep people excited (why can't I set up separate voice mail boxes for family members?) but I do think it's saving me money. Mostly I just dread the hassle of finding a new provider and transferring my telephone number, what a pain.

Fundamentally, I don't even see why I'm still stuck paying a phone bill at all. I don't pay an email bill or a filesharing bill.

Re:Ain't Gonna Help

[bigpat]

Sunrocket [sunrocket.com] and Packet8 [packet8.net] look like promising VOIP providers. I'll be switching to one of these shortly. I never liked the idea of Vonage being the 100 Lb gorilla anyway, they seemed to be a good example of the proverb about keeping 'all your eggs in one basket'. And as The big player in independent PSTN VOIP interoperability they also seemed taylor made for Verizon to come along and kill them off as an example to others, so they could keep their market position.

Also seems that if this Verizon patent is valid and actually being used by anyone who routes calls from IP to PSTN, then Verizon could possibly use this to kill off Comcast and RCN phone services depending on how they have architected their systems. Though they would presumably have some alternative to IP routing since they control their own wires.