The business of Internet, wireless, and telecom law.
Femtocells are going to move fast in the coming 12 months. Wireless carriers will push the residential gateway from zero units to millions. On August 13, 2007, Xchange Magazine reported that In-Stat is projecting that by 2011 there will be 40 million femtocells in use and 101 million users of femtocells. Femtocells are micro cell phone [...]
Femtocells could revolutionize cellular service in terms of diverting cell traffic off the network, providing great service in buildings and homes, increasing bandwidth speed, and, most significantly, increasing the service providers’ footprints outside their licensed areas. Cell phone service providers, like Sprint or T-Mobile, would be able use femtocells to off-load traffic to their customer’s provided [...]
Femtocells could have a dramatic change on the cell phone service environment. ABI research predicts there will be 150 million femtocell users by 2012. That is from zero users today, as reported by GigaOm. On the other side of the race, In-Sat, as quoted in PDAStreet, projects there will be 200 million dual mode WiFi [...]
TMC announced today that WiFiMobile is selling unlocked smartphones in the US market with VoIP software clients included: “WiFiMobile addresses the Wi-Fi starved US smartphone market.” WiFiMobile has been competing in Europe by providing a VoIP client for the Nokia N95 and Nokia S60. The VoIP-mobile company competes with Truphone in the UK. Truphone, a [...]
UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access) is driving FMC (Fixed Mobile Convergence). UMA is really WiFi and cell phones combined. ABI Research, as reported by InformationWeek, currently projects that there will be 65 million UMA users by 2012. The growth in UMA is happening without strategic thinking by the wireless providers. Almost like a small sound that will [...]
More significant than the iPhone (nothing could be that important…) this week there were several events that announced to the general public that fixed mobile convergence is hitting the mainstream. The interesting point is that is not exactly as FMC was anticipated back in 1990. In 1990, PCS “Personal Communication System” was touted as the [...]
Although reported today by the New York Times as a “Setback” for Verizon v Vonage, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal District denied in its May 3, 2007 order Vonage’s May 1, 2007 motion for a new trial based on the recent April 30, 2007 Supreme Court opinion in KSR v. Teleflex. KSR [...]
Om Malik has a great post today about prior art for the VoIP patents. There is also a good Wiki site scratchpad summarizing the claims. One of the papers identified by Om was published on January 13, 1997, describes the process of using a gateway server to translate a VoIP call into a number to be used to [...]
The Court in Verizon v Vonage (see the Feb, 12, 2007 Order) found one of three Verizon patents to be infringed was U.S. Patent No. 6,282,574. Verizon Patent No. 6,282,574, filed on February 24, 2000, provides in Claim 26: “A method comprising: +receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network; +translating a name [...]
The surprising Verizon v Vonage patent order already seems like old news. Most VoIP pundits and VoIP businesses are sitting on the sidelines like England and France did before World War II hoping and smiling and not believing that an aggressor was on the offensive and would soon occupy and destroy most of Europe. (“Peace for [...]
