Just a day after the court handed NTP good news in its lawsuit against RIM the US Patent and Trademark Office tossed a wet blanket on the party by rejecting, for the second time, all the claims in one of five patents at issue.
The USPTO is reexamining all five patents and had previously rejected all claims of each patent in so-called “first office” actions. NTP appealed those rulings, as one would expect. Yesterday the USPTO rejected all claims in patent number 6,067,451 and said it expects that the ruling will become final. The office further said it would have characterized the ruling as final but it is waiting for further information from NTP regarding Telenor.
Who’s Telenor, you ask? Well, they were once called Norwegian Telecom and operated as the national phone company of Norway, back when there were PTTs. (And while it may not prove germane, Telenor was one of the original adopters of Mobitex, which means that it was operating wireless data systems in the late 1980s. Telenor even hosted the second MOA meeting ever held, in December 1998. NTP filed for the five patents at issue in 1995 or later.)
RIM found a couple of books describing wireless email written by Telenor during the 1980s and brought them to the USPTO’s attention earlier this year (see this article by Forbes).
Just when I thought this case couldn’t get more interesting…
Sprint/Nextel has just made an offer to purchase Velocita from Ceberus…12/15/2005
What are your thoughts?
Frankly, it would appear not to make a lot of sense from Sprint’s perspective, but I’d withhold judgement until I knew the price.
Sprint has its hands overflowing trying to integrate two very different corporate cultures, two sales philosophies which appear to be at odds with one another and two networks which couldn’t be more different.
Velocita has an interesting customer base, but it wouldn’t be worth too much by itself. Their network is excellent, but is not voice capable and is very low bandwidth. They do have some spectrum which would be complementary but by itself it wouldn’t appear to be valuable enough to justify a purchase.
Unless the price were very low I don’t see the rationale behind such a move. What does Velocita have that Sprint/Nextel lack? More importantly, what does Velocita have that Sprint/Nextel needs so much that they be willing to not only part with cash but also put up with the significant integration issues?