Thomas Howe, who is at the Web 2.0 Conference, finds it hard to believe that Vonage is stuck and plays off of a theme that may be designed to cause pity and sympathy by questioning why they don't have a workaround.
For that type of answer we need a better explanation of what Vonage has in their network, or maybe what they don't have. From what I understand they have SBC's (Session Border Controllers), Media Gateways and SIP Proxies, and not much else beyond an authentication server. If they do, I'd like to hear it, because in the past (like three years or so ago) they never would say what they had, other than that they had their own software to manage their network.
Now, how can Vonage survive? Easy. Turn the network over to someone like Level3 which already has the infrastucture. The issue becomes the ATAs and that's about an 80-100 million dollar hit to replace 2.2 of them, unless there is some way to have people execute a firmware upgrade (yeah Joe Public knows how to do this).
The more and more one looks at this, licensing is the cheap way out..to buy time..which was the mistake Vonage made.
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