Ideally Vonage should have been deploying off-the-shelf VoIP gear in order to work its way round the patent infringement troubles. But I don’t think any vendor is going to trust the troubled company with the post payment invoice option! And with the cumulative amount of existing fines, Vonage will not be left with much cash to buy new equipment and keep going at the same time. One would have thought that the ASP model of Vonage will make the company collapse under its own weight. But it is collapsing for different reasons altogether.
The simplest way would have been for Vonage to deploy off-the-shelf softswitch solution, specifically the call agent and feature server software. The volume of off-the-shelf call agent and applications software needed to replace Vonage’s proprietary solution will cost the company at least $50 million. However, the service provider gets an opportunity to survive. But if you cannot afford to do so, why not try open source Asterisk which has successfully been deployed by several VoIP service providers.
As the industry would know, Vonage has been working for a long time with Cisco. The service provider mostly uses Cisco media gateways to convert IP traffic into PSTN. At the start of 2006 last year, Vonage brought in another media gateway vendor in form of Sonus. So if Vonage possesses third party gear to do the conversion between IP to PSTN, how can it violate patents held by Verizon and Sprint in this area? Well, because the conversion is completed together by media gateway at the media level and by a call agent at the control level. It is the call agent part which is violating the patents held by Verizon and Sprint. Had the media gateway part been found infringing patents, then either Cisco or Sonus would have been in trouble, not Vonage.
When Vonage announced the Sonus deal it made clear that the deal was limited to gateways only. For all call control and enhanced features, Vonage decided to stick to its home grown proprietary solution. Vonage has a strong in-house (patent violating!!) engineering team of around 100 engineers that develop SIP based software and manage the service provider’s network. Had the service provider deployed third party call agent earlier, the situation for Vonage would have been different today.
Deploying Asterisk will cost only the hardware. The company would be able to support all the common calling features that it presently offers. If the company stops further marketing for now, reduces its the engineering staff and retain only a few training them on open source stuff, and deploys Asterisk type option at various POPs (a single POP deployment would be problematic due to scalability issues with the open source platforms), I think Vonage has an opportunity to have another go at things. It would be disappointing to see Vonage disappear the way it is, given that this company has heightened the awareness about VoBB globally.