Source: www.voip-news.com

Network-1 Security Solutions, Inc. has agreed to settle its court battle with NETGEAR. NETGEAR was accused of infringing on Network-1’s Remote Power Patent.

Under the settlement, NETGEAR will have a non-elusive license to the technology that runs through March 2020, paying quarterly royalties based on the sales of its Power over Ethernet products. Additionally, there will be an upfront payment of $350,000.

“We are very pleased that NETGEAR agreed to take advantage of the terms of our Special Licensing Program and become a licensee of our Remote Power Patent,” commented Corey M. Horowitz, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Network-1. “This outcome is consistent with Network-1’s goal of making licenses available to the technologies covered by the Remote Power Patent to the Power over Ethernet industry in a manner that promotes the widespread adoption of this important industry standard.”

According to Network-1:

The Remote Power Patent relates to, among other things, delivering power over Ethernet cables to remotely power network connected devices including, among others, wireless switches, wireless access points, RFID card readers, VoIP telephones and network cameras. In June 2003, the IEEE approved the 802.3af PoE Standard which led to the rapid adoption of PoE. The IEEE is currently working on the 802.3at Power over Ethernet Plus (PoE Plus) Standard which will increase the maximum power delivered to network devices to 40-60 watts from the current 15 watts under the 802.3af Standard.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Gigamon has received three new patents for its data access switching technology, which they say ensures the protection of their Data Acccess Network (DAN) technology.

“Gigamon’s DAN approach, as made available through its GigaVUE family of data access switches, has reshaped the way companies monitor their networks for everything from troubleshooting to lawful intercept. We’re pleased that our innovative approach has been recognized with the issuance of U.S. patents,” said Patrick Leong, Gigamon’s chief technical officer.

The company says that the technology is being used by more than 400 telecom, industrial, manufacturing, financial, research, medical, retail, utility and government networks in 36 countries.

“With the proliferation of tools for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, intrusion detection, forensic recording, VoIP analysis and the like, TAP or SPAN ports can be overwhelmed,” said Leong. “The result is that engineers often have to fight for access to network traffic. DAN technology avoids this issue by aggregating, replicating and filtering network traffic to any number of different GigE or 10 GigE monitoring tools.”

Source: www.voip-news.com

Vonage has a new patent. It’s for something called “Method and Apparatus for Enhanced Internet Telephony.” According to the company, “The invention, which was filed for patent in 2003, makes it less likely for customers to encounter dropped calls, incomplete attempted calls or other communication problems resulting from typical router function and behavior.”

“This is an exciting moment for Vonage as we continue to expand our patent portfolio to help create a more reliable calling experience for our customers,” said Louis Mamakos, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President. “This patent further reflects the depth of talent and creativity we have here at Vonage.”

According to Vonage:

The patent — No. 7,417,981 — pertains to improvements in Internet telephony where Network Address Translation (NAT) is required. The patent addresses the issue of a router losing an outbound port during an Internet telephone connection. To avoid the router timing out and closing the outbound port, the patent causes the media terminal adapter to send an outbound message to the Internet telephony regional data center.

Source: www.voip-news.com

A Federal jury ruled today that Cox didn’t infringe on Verizon’s patents. Verizon had sued the competing company earlier this year, after winning a similar lawsuit against Vonage.

No such luck this time.

Verizon isn’t sure if they will appeal and drag the whole thing out further …

According to Information World:

Cox hailed the decision and said it looks forward “to competing vigorously with Verizon in the marketplace, not in the courtroom.” Among other arguments, cable provider Cox had said its cable calling service isn’t routed over the public Internet.

In the aftermath of the decision, Verizon said it hadn’t decided whether it would appeal the decision. Verizon isn’t a major provider of VoIP services, although its Verizon Voice Wing VoIP FiOS service utilizes the IP technology.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Click-to-call patents are up for auction in the U.S. on September 16. Companies including Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Sprint and Vonage has been invited to partake in the auction.

“We are extremely excited about the opportunity to bring these patents to market for the first time. We strongly feel that our ‘click-to-call’ portfolio of patents is uniquely positioned to facilitate growth and add value to the online advertising space,” said Ernesto Liebster, President of CLICK.

The use and popularity of click-to-call applications is expected to ponly increase with time.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Judah Klausner, an inventer, is on the war path. He’s filed a lawsuit against Google, Verizon and more for an allleged voicemail patent violation.

Klausner, who recently settled with iPhone maker Apple on a similar lawsuit, holds a patent for video voicemail, which he filed in May.

According to eWeek:

The inventor’s company, Klausner Technologies Inc, also named as defendants LG Electronics Inc, Comverse Technology Inc, Citrix Systems Inc and Embarq Corp in a patent infringement complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Tyler, Texas, according to a court filing.

Anticipating the attack, Verizon filed its own lawsuit against Klausner two weeks ago in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York that seeks to have a federal judge declare the inventor’s visual voicemail patent invalid.

Source: www.voip-news.com

I promised to talk about this today, so here it is.

8×8, Inc. has received a new patent. I won’t bore you with the exact number. The patent is for something called distributed local telephony gateway . . . it was awarded on July 1.

According to the patent announcement, the patent is related to IP communication systems and broadband telephony services that have distributed local gateways . . . Whatever that means.

The company has more than 70 patents.

Source: www.voip-news.com

8×8, Inc. was awarded a new patent earlier this month. U.S. Patent No. 7,339,604, “Videoconferencing Arrangement Having Multi-Purpose Digital Still Camera,” was issued on March 4. 8×8 now holds 72 U.S. patents for voice and video communications and storage technologies.

According to 8×8:

The patent relates to a videoconferencing system with a modular terminal that includes a conventional digital still camera coupled to an input port of the system.

8×8 was established in 1987.

Source: www.voip-news.com

Stronger, safer, tougher: that’s the gist of a reissued patent that 8×8 just received (they held the old patent too).

8×8, Inc. was granted a patent regarding “an arrangement for controlling audio signal transmissions for a communications system that includes a microphone and a video camera,” according to a press release from the company. The patent is a reissuing of the “Video-Assisted Audio Signal Processing System and Method,” patent with strengthened intellectual property rights to the invention.

8×8 has been issued 71 patents in the United States since it was created in 1987.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

It looks like Apple is taking some protectionist steps around next generation enhancements to iChat.

The folks a MacNet News have dug into some recent patent application filings by the crew in Curpertino and found some revealing details.

Source: www.theregister.co.uk

Vonage and Nortel have agreed to settle their patent differences with an exchange of licenses, and no money changing hands, ending a year of litigation for Vonage and clearing the decks before 2008.

Claims of damages, lodged during the dispute, have also been dropped. The patents involved were originally owned by Digital Packet Licensing, and cover emergency service connections and click-to-call technologies. Vonage bought that company, which had lodged a complaint against Nortel in 2004, and was itself subject to a counter-claim earlier this year.

The agreement follows a string of deals with AT&T, Spring, Nextel and Verizon, all of whom have been involved in litigation with the company, though most of those involved Vonage paying the respective companies large amounts of money.

Now that those disputes are out of the way the VOIP company should be able to focus on building up its 2.7 million customer base, something it’ll need to do if it’s going to compete as a real telecommunications company.®

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

Credit Ike Elliott, who used to be a ranking executive at Level3, for coming up with this one about Vonage and their on-going patent woes.

Ike makes some good points about why Vonage, now owning DPL’s patents, are at least in a slightly better position than they were before.

I am not at all surprised at this because all along I’ve said Vonage had very little, if any technology of their own in their network…..This just further supports my feelings.

Then just after composing this, I read Tom Keating’s alert about an outage that seems to be affecting a good number of their customers. After paging through a few pages of the Vonage-Forum that Tom linked to, this is not a minor issue, and looking at some of the comments, it seems Vonage really hasn’t done much to bolster user confidence around this or other customer service related matters. They continue to have the approach of sign up as many new customers as they can, then if a problem arises and the customer leaves, who cares.