VoIP technology company ShoreTel has filed a patent infringement counterclaim against competitor Mitel Networks. Filed in Ontario Canada Superior Court, the suit seeks $10 million in damages as well as an injunction.The action comes in reaction to a Mitel patent infringement filing against ShoreTel at the end of June....
When last week's failure of SunRocket left some 200,000 subscribers scrambling for an alternative home phone service, many saw this as the free market at work. Free market as in, survival of the fittest, and the availability of other choices waving discounts to former SR customers as the wisdom of...
Every Thursday morning, the United States Patent & Trademark Office updates their online roster of published Patent applications.If you come here, as well as to my BlackBerry Beat blog, you'll notice that I post one or more of these newly published applications weekly.Based on some of your Comments, I...
(Hey guess what, this isn't an iPhone post!!)But it's important to one of our core missions.Fellow VoIP blogger Jon Arnold's just back from a Mitel conference. They make VoIP products and solutions.Mitel is suing ShoreTel big time. Oh, and ShoreTel makes VoIP products and solutions.Jon's take is here.I share...
Yes, I know its a cliche to call today's Internet music radio boycott "the day the music died," but actually that's not much of a stretch.Backgrounder: numerous Internet radio stations- from large ones operated by Yahoo and MTV to smaller ones operated out of garages- fall silent today in protest...
Colleague Anne Broache reports that a federal appeals court weighing the patent case that Verizon filed against Vonage heard arguments earlier today but did not immediately reach a decision.Anne thinks that one hint about what the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit may be thinking...
FCC Chair Kevin Martin is addressing NXTComm now via a satellite hookup.Priorities he's mentioned include:Â Making sure that Uni versal Service fee assessment policies are updated so that people live in rural areas can be connected to broadband. He backed reverse auctions as a way to fast-track this goal. Making sure that...
 The Australian Communications and Media Authority ACMA said today it is proposing changes to the Telecommunications Emergency Call Service Determination 2002 to confirm the obligation to provide free-of-charge access to emergency call services for ‘two-way' and 'dial-out only' VoIP. 'Many VoIP providers already provide free-of-charge access to triple zero and these proposals clarify that...
Late Thursday, The Federal Communications Commission extended the disability access requirements of Sections 225 and 255 of the Communications Act, which currently apply to traditional phone services, to providers of interconnected VoIP services and to manufacturers of equipment used to provide those services.Section 255 of the...
Starting today, U.S. soldiers stationed in South Korea can no longer use U.S.-based VoIP services to phone home.Now, they will have to use a South Korean telco such as Korea Telecom Corp., Hanaro Telecom Inc. as well as LG Dacom Corp. These soldiers must obtain a South Korean local...
Whenever I write a post about Patents- on this blog, on my ZDNet BlackBerry Beat blog, or elsewhere- I always seem to receive a bunch of "what's new about this," "why is this patentable", "ya gotta be kidding me," or in the boilerplate view of one reader- "all patents...
The New Jersey Turnpike Authority's video cameras captured a fatal crash earlier this month in which a 52 year-old New Jersey resident crashed into the roadway's Great Egg Harbor Toll Plaza.Not long therafter, video of the crash wound up on YouTube as well as on two other video sharing sites.Now,...
Sam Peterson II of Sparta, Michigan has been arrested and charged with stealing the Wi-Fi connection from a nearby coffee shop. He was arrested after a police investigation targeted his computer.The ultimate penalty for the 2000-vintage law: five years in jail, $10,000 fine.The law says:752.795 Prohibited conduct.Sec. 5.A person shall...
A newly published Information Week article calls into question the short-to-mid-term market appeal of municipal Wi-Fi.Muni Wi-Fi built by such service providers as MetroFi- one of whose access points is pictured above.While not breaking formative new ground, the article notes that many of these projects have been contracted in...
A fellow named Dennis Dilbeck has sued Netflix, based on his perception that two of the company's Patents were granted without full disclosure of prior art- and that lack of disclosure has provided Netflix with a degree of protection that has enabled the company to "monopolize" the online DVD rental...
I'm not at the Personal Democracy Forum, but I have been receiving regular updates from MoveOn.org about what they believe is selective censorship of some user-generated content from MySpace.A pamphlet was to be distributed by MoveOn.org to an early afternoon panel featuring MoveOn's Executive Director Eli Pariser and MySpace's main...
Ever since the "patent infringement" hissing and dissing match between Microsoft and the open source community flared up earlier this week, I've been wondering how Asterisk open source solution providers are looking at this issue.True, none of the 236 open source patents Microsoft is claiming infringement upon directly relate to...
Effective today, the U.S. Department of Defense has started blocking access over its Internet networks to You Tube, MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365; and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.DoD says this is being done for two reasons: to soften demand on its networks,...
FedEx has a squeaky clean image. It is hard to imagine them running afoul of local law enforcement by interfering with police dispatching signals.But thats exactly what FedEx did in and around Riverside, California. And in a judgement announced by the FCC last Friday, FedEx is going to have...
In the somewhat self-delusional world that some Vonage execs, analysts and users seem to inhabit, yesterdays stay of an order allowing Vonage to keep signing up new customers until the patent infringement issues with Verizon are settled amounts to a win.I have a hard time viewing this attitude as reality....
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