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Vonage has seen more than their share of trouble lately, now instead of patent issues with Verizon they are being sued by the former VOIP provider Sun Rocket. After SunRocket closed its doors without warning, Vonage and a few other providers stepped up and offered support for the customers. Vonage had started talks with SunRocket about buying the subscriber base and other assets, however talks went bad and now SunRocket is claiming that Vonage broke a confidentiality agreement and used the customer list to try and get the customers.

SunRocket filed the complaint claiming that the customer base is “one of its single most valuable remaining assets” and Vonage caused “immediate and irreparable harm and injury”. SunRocket is looking for both a return of the list and also monetary damages. Vonage is not denying the talks or the confidentiality agreement but they are claiming they received the list from a third-party broker after SunRocket had shut down.

“We obtained the subscriber list through an established broker, and we were assured the data was legally obtained and could be used without violating anyone’s proprietary rights,” Sahner said. “There is no connection to the [confidentiality] agreement.”

SunRocket has also stated that the (former) SunRocket customers are under the impression that Vonage has the list legally and that SunRocket had sold that information to them and that it threatens to agreement they had with both Unified Communications and 8x8. It seems to me that a lot of mis-communication may have come from the fact that SunRocket had disappeared for a few days prior to announcing they were shutting down, had they been more upfront they would probably be a lot better off now.

Read [Washington Post]