Andy Abramson has just posted some correspondence between himself and an R&D Consulting Engineer. Looks like 3Com had a patent in process at the same time as Verizon’s patent.
I originally wrote up this patent for USR back in early 1996 (US patent number 6,529,501), it is now assigned to 3Com. The whole purpose of this patent was how to address mapping computers, VOIP phone devices, and regular phones to each other using the PSTN and the Internet using central lookup servers to match phone numbers and IP addresses.
As far as I can tell, it covers most of the issues that Verizon sued Vonage over. I’m a hardware/software engineer, not a patent lawyer, so I don’t know if any of has any implications.
Is it possible that Vonage has a chance at survival now?
What in the world is going to happen to all of the lesser of VOIP companies? Will they be required to cease operations? Hmmm…