A Washington analyst who was part of the original VoIP Forum says there is solid proof that Verizon received patents on aspects of VoIP networking that were already in existence, and that the federal district court that found Vonage in violation of Verizon’s patents used the broadest possible interpretation of the patent language.

Even so, says Daniel Berninger, now a telecom analyst with Tier1Research, Vonage “faces a long, hard road” to climbing out from under a $58 million judgment imposed by the U.S. District Court in Virginia.

Vonage next week will appeal a judge’s order that it must stop signing up new customers on its VoIP network, as long as that network uses the patented technology. Vonage admitted in a Security and Exchange Commission 10K filing this week that it doesn’t have a work-around to avoid using the patents.

Berninger, who was once affiliated with Vonage and is a veteran in the VoIP world, said it is virtually impossible to avoid impinging on the Verizon patents when they are being interpreted as broadly as the jury did in the Verizon-Vonage case. Specifically, the court looking almost generically at the gatekeeper function and the name translation functions that are key to VoIP.

“These interpretations get to everyone--everyone does call set-up, connects to the Internet and does name translation,” Berninger said. “Without name translation, we are all stuck entering IP addresses into our phones, which clearly doesn’t work.”

He questions whether the industry, including major technology players such as Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel and Motorola, are going to be content to let Verizon hold the patents on such basic technology.

“There are a whole bunch of info-tech companies as well as a few telecom equipment companies that made a lot of investment to create these open standards,” Berninger said. “It’s hard to believe that Verizon can pull that off the table.”

There is also danger for Verizon in having the patents interpreted so broadly, Berninger said.

“They are basically saying ‘We own name translation that has anything to do with gateways,’ he said. “That’s a problem for Verizon because it sucks in all prior art [Published work that could dispute the patent claim].”

For example, he said, gatekeepers were initially created as part of the H.323 standard, initially designed as a solution for video over a local area network but later used in early VoIP.

Vonage’s problems, now that it has been ruled to infringe on Verizon’s patents, are more complex. The company has said it will continue to appeal, and the original judgment could be thrown out on appeal, Berninger said. Vonage is not able to introduce new evidence in the appeals process, and it doesn’t know how much of the “prior art” got into the case the first time around because court records are sealed.

The other possibility is that the U.S. Patent Office will re-examine the Verizon patents and limit their applicability because of the existence of prior art.