BellSouth's Incredibly Short Trial With Vonage
from the hello,-goodbye dept
Just two days ago, News.com had a huge article about how Vonage, the voice over IP people who offer a flat rate phone service using DSL or cable modem service, were helping BellSouth offer a branded version of the service over their DSL lines. Today, BellSouth announced that they were ending the trial. That certainly didn't last long. What appears to have happened is that the BellSouth/Vonage agreement wasn't public until News.com mentioned it on Wednesday. In that same article, they pointed out that despite this working arrangement the two companies were fighting about some telecom regulation issues. My guess is that this caught the attention of some higher up folks at BellSouth who decided to pull the plug on the Vonage trials. This is probably a long term mistake. VoIP services, such as Vonage, are going to start eating into BellSouth's core business. It would make much more sense for them to have a piece of that pie from the very beginning, rather than scrambling to catch up later on.
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Catch up? Why bother when they can just sue...
You find some obscure law or restriction that they might possibly be in violation of and then you either sick the feds on them (as Adobe did with Dmitry) or you find some IP that they might be violating and sue the heck out of them and try to drive them out of business (insert any one of a thousand recent similar lawsuits here).
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Vonage!
I totally love it.
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No Subject Given
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VoIP
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