Sprint Suing Vonage and Voiceglo - huh?
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This one came out of left field yesterday, and it's been covered by a number of bloggers already, namely Jeff Pulver, Andy Abramson, Om Malik and Mark Evans. I was in transit when this story broke, but managed to speak with Business Week while waiting for a connecting flight.
Basically, I said the action has little merit, which has been echoed by the other bloggers. What I found most interesting, though, is naming Vonage and Voiceglo. I can see them going after Vonage - they're the only pure play rez VoIP operator really worth following. But why Voiceglo? I've commented about them before, but their business model is very different from Vonage, and their traction is essentially peer to peer. Maybe Sprint scanned an alphabetical list of VoIP operators, and guess what? Voiceglo comes after Vonage. OK - that makes sense - sort of. Aside from both having their names start with the same letter, I don't see many other points in common.
Voiceglo just announced hitting 5 million users. That's 5 times what Vonage has, but there aren't any real revenues to talk about there. Voiceglo is really much more in Skype territory than Vonage, so it's hard to see what Sprint's beef is with them. Maybe they got excited seeing 5 million - of anything. That number is 1/10th of what Skype claims, so it's relatively small - but they're probably the closest one out there to Skype in terms of users. So, that's gotta count for something, right? That said, I just don't see why they would name Voiceglo instead of operators who are much closer to Vonage - Packet8, Broadvoice, etc. Let's see if Sprint has a comeback now that the business press has picked up on this. Either they're on to something nobody else knows about, or they did this in haste.
Basically, I said the action has little merit, which has been echoed by the other bloggers. What I found most interesting, though, is naming Vonage and Voiceglo. I can see them going after Vonage - they're the only pure play rez VoIP operator really worth following. But why Voiceglo? I've commented about them before, but their business model is very different from Vonage, and their traction is essentially peer to peer. Maybe Sprint scanned an alphabetical list of VoIP operators, and guess what? Voiceglo comes after Vonage. OK - that makes sense - sort of. Aside from both having their names start with the same letter, I don't see many other points in common.
Voiceglo just announced hitting 5 million users. That's 5 times what Vonage has, but there aren't any real revenues to talk about there. Voiceglo is really much more in Skype territory than Vonage, so it's hard to see what Sprint's beef is with them. Maybe they got excited seeing 5 million - of anything. That number is 1/10th of what Skype claims, so it's relatively small - but they're probably the closest one out there to Skype in terms of users. So, that's gotta count for something, right? That said, I just don't see why they would name Voiceglo instead of operators who are much closer to Vonage - Packet8, Broadvoice, etc. Let's see if Sprint has a comeback now that the business press has picked up on this. Either they're on to something nobody else knows about, or they did this in haste.
