About 5 or 6 Years ago when VoIP was “the new thing”, I looked at a few companies. Packet8 was a little too expensive, Broadvoice was awesome and they started the whole “free international” calls thing, but they had a lot of latency/delay (in my opinion, at least.) Then there was Vonage. Audio quality was good, low latency, didn’t wait on hold 45 minutes for tech support… The price seemed right and they were the “biggest” and seemingly the most likely to be around forever.
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) seemed poised to eradicate land lines. Then, all the cable and phone companies started doing their own VoIP thing. Then Verizon sued Vonage for patent infringement. It seems that the legal team funded by over-priced verizon services had a squatters pattent on an idea of regular telephone service using the internet. They waited until Vonage really started to be successful and then sued. In addition to a lump sum judgment, Vonage has to cough up 5.5% of every subscriber to Verizon. Kinda makes you want to have sympathy for Vonage, no? How do they stay afloat, right? I’m not so sure.
