Burns on Vonage plane after pushing bill
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Montana Sen. Conrad Burns, a Republican in a tight re-election race, flew on a private plane chartered by Vonage Holdings Corp. just days after he pushed legislation that the company has advocated for more than a year.
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Vonage, an Internet phone service provider, and emergency telecom specialist Intrado say together they&#39;ve conducted successful trials of an advanced means of making emergency phone calls using the Internet.
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Company "delighted" it wasn't more A US District Court jury said Vonage Holdings violated three patents held by Verizon Communications and ordered the VoIP telephony company to pay $58m in damages and annual royalties.â¦
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The company will begin payments ranging from $25 toward a future flight to a round-trip ticket to passengers kept waiting by the airlineâs own mistakes.
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Vonage must pay damages and a 5.5 percent royalty rate on future sales in order to continue using Verizon technology.
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Last weekâs storm has cost the airline $10 million in refunds, $16 million in travel vouchers and $4 million in expenses like overtime.
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By ALLEN, Sue  THE war of words between CallPlus and Telecom over thousands of lost broadband connections ramped up a notch yesterday, with CallPlus laying the blame at Telecom's door.
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By Elizabeth Lazarowitz, Daily News, New York  Feb. 5--With family and friends in such far-flung places as Hong Kong and  Argentina, Carlos Ronisky used to run up hefty phone bills just trying to keep  in touch.   Then he heard about VoIP.
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(InfoWorld) - On Monday evening, my wife reached me on my mobile phone. She was spending a long weekend with her family in Maine. "I've called our home phone several times," she said. "And I keep getting a busy signal." That night, I didn't think twice about the phone problem. We have been VoIP customers for more than a year, and flaky service has been standard operating procedure. I reset my VoIP converter box and crossed my fingers. Then, on Tuesday, when the problems persisted, I called my VoIP provider, SunRocket, and got the message that the company was no longer taking tech support and sales calls. That's not good. Many free-market analysts and large telecom providers have hailed this as a new era of competition. It's a wonderful new world where your VoIP provider can cut off your home phone service without warning. This week, SunRocket went belly up without any communication to its 200,000 customers. SunRocket had been providing both my home and my home office phone service. I could charitably say that phone service since Monday evening has been intermittent. In reality, phone service has been mostly dead with occasional spurts of dial tone. Now, when business associates try to call my home office, they get either a busy signal, or they get one ring and a hang-up. I'm trying to switch my home and office numbers to Vonage, but they say it could take up to 10 days for the switch to happen. When I first heard about SunRocket more than a year ago, it seemed like a good solution to large monthly telephone bills. The local incumbent phone service was charging about $60 a month for unlimited local and long distance. SunRocket offered unlimited local andÂ long distance and even some international calling for $199 a year. The company also offered a second out-of-area-code phone number at no cost. That feature caught my eye because my home office is in suburban Maryland, but most of the people who call me are located in Washington, D.C. My wife and I looked at a savings of more than $500 a year and decided it was time to check out VoIP. The switch was not without problems. Voice quality was spotty at best, particularly when we were talking to someone on a mobile phone. For months, we had problems with frequently dropped calls. We soon became quite familiar with the "not-my-fault" phenomenon. SunRocket blamed the problems on Comcast, our broadband provider. Comcast, of course, blamed SunRocket. (Comcast: We can't guarantee quality of service for third-party applications. By the way, why don't you switch to our voice over IP service -- it only costs double what you're paying now.) After months of experimenting with equipment configuration, we finally got most of the problems ironed out. When it came time to renew our annual subscription, we had mixed feelings, but SunRocket was still significantly cheaper that most alternatives. We paid $199 for a year of service in March. In late June, in a sign of things to come, SunRocket laid off about a quarter of its workforce. The way I look at it, someone owes us about nine months of phone service, but we're not holding our breath. Now, in some ways, this is just a story about a couple hundred thousand VoIP customers who saw their phone service go dead without warning. But there's a larger context here. During the last couple of years, some telecom analysts, free-market think tanks, and telecom carriers have trumpeted a new era of competition. Their argument: Old, monopoly-style regulations aren't needed any more because there's all kinds of competition out there. They say that telecom carriers shouldn't have to share their networks with competitors and broadband providers shouldn't be prohibited from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors because there's all kinds of competition out there. Meanwhile, SunRocket, the second largest independent VoIP provider, has shut down. Vonage, the largest independent VoIP provider, has faced a patent infringement lawsuit from giant competitor Verizon, and its future is uncertain. Verizon contends it owns the patent to the technology that translates VoIP calls and allows them to connect to traditional telephone networks. Wireless phone carriers provide some competition, but the largest two wireless carriers are owned by the two giant telecom carriers. I'm not sure that counts as competition. In the broadband space, there are some indications that one or two new competitors are on the way, but it could take years. Right now, well over 90 percent of the U.S. has at most two broadband providers, the cable company or the telecom carrier. The telecom carriers are fighting against auction rules that would encourage a new broadband provider when a chunk of television spectrum is freed up in early 2009. Elsewhere, broadband customers in other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pay less for faster service. Japanese customers pay about one-seventh what U.S. customers do per megabit of bandwidth. But few people in D.C. want to talk about the real reasons for this. It's not free-market competition; instead, telecom services in many other countries are highly regulated and subsidized by the government. For some of us, the promise of telecom competition seems a long way off. And, by the way, if you want to find me during the next week, your best bet is probably e-mail.
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AT&T Corp.  and Internet telephone  provider Vonage said on Thursday they were cutting prices for  their residential Internet calling services by $5 per month,  the strongest signs yet of a price war in the nascent market.
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VoIP app and 250MB of storage space VoIP telephony company Vonage has launched its V-Phone USB calling kit in the UK. It's the size of a Flash drive - there's 250MB of free storage space on there - but also includes all you need to use your Vonage account on any PC, anywhere.â¦
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Paying for the pipes Analysis A Voice over IP service was to blame for a man in Massachusetts bursting into flames at the weekend.â¦
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TORONTO,  - A Canadian oil-field worker, stunned  to get a C$85,000 ($83,700) cell phone bill, has had the  charges reduced to C$3,400, but is still fighting them.
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Beleaguered Internet telephone company Vonage Holdings Corp. disclosed Friday it is being sued by AT&T Inc. for alleged patent infringement.
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Unlimited browser plan? Not exactly... A Calgary man who mistakenly believed that a $10 "unlimited mobile browser plan" would enable him to surf the internet with impunity, "downloading high-definition movies and other bandwidth-hungry applications", was slapped with an $85,000 bill for his trouble.â¦
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Plus: Taxicab chats threatened by technology. [News.com Extra]
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According to Vonage, rumors of its demise due to its ongoing patent litigation with Verizon have been greatly exaggerated. Vonage is accused by Verizon of violating seven even patents covering telephone features and the use of Wi-Fi to place telephone calls.