AT&T has no reason to buy Vonage, nor would they want to. Simply put, they stand to gain nothing. AT&T already offers broadband voip, and has the capability and capacity to terminate voip traffic more efficiently than Vonage can ever hope for. All AT&T would gain is debt, a handful of subscribers, and more potential patent lawsuits in the wake of the Verizon troubles that Vonage had been dealing with. You are more likely to see Vonage attempting to buy out voip carriers to gain more patents - either to cover their asses for future lawsuits, or to sue others. Seeing how every voip patent lawsuit out there is pointless though - all voip patents are the same, in reality. Anyone can take off-the-shelf hardware running software conforming to industry specs laid out for common voip protocols, does that really make it's existence unique enough to patent? Hardly. But AT&T buying Vonage? Only in the wildest dreams of Vonage employees and shareholders
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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AT&T has no reason to buy Vonage, nor would they want to. Simply put, they stand to gain nothing. AT&T already offers broadband voip, and has the capability and capacity to terminate voip traffic more efficiently than Vonage can ever hope for. All AT&T would gain is debt, a handful of subscribers, and more potential patent lawsuits in the wake of the Verizon troubles that Vonage had been dealing with. You are more likely to see Vonage attempting to buy out voip carriers to gain more patents - either to cover their asses for future lawsuits, or to sue others. Seeing how every voip patent lawsuit out there is pointless though - all voip patents are the same, in reality. Anyone can take off-the-shelf hardware running software conforming to industry specs laid out for common voip protocols, does that really make it's existence unique enough to patent? Hardly. But AT&T buying Vonage? Only in the wildest dreams of Vonage employees and shareholders