A federal judge in Boston has ordered Cable & Wireless to stop using Internet content delivery
network technology (CDN) that infringes on patents held by Akamai .
Akamai hailed the injunction as a “major victory” while C&W shrugged it off, saying it no longer uses the technology in question.
“We will now turn our attention to seeking full compensation from Cable & Wireless for the long-standing infringement of this patent,” said George Conrades,
Akamai’s chairman and CEO.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai has not specified how much money it is seeking. It added it will seek a contempt of court order if C&W does not comply with the
injunction.
David Judson, Akamai’s patent counsel, said he does not believe C&W’s “post-trial attempts to design around these claims have succeeded.” C&W’s service,
formerly known as Digital Island 2.0, is now sold under the Exodus name,
Meanwhile, C&W, which has CDN operations in San Francisco, said the ruling has no affect on customers.
“It is a legal technicality about a legacy part of our CDN service that was abandoned eight months ago, and like the fable of old, Akamai is trying to make gold from
straw,” said Chris Albinson, chief strategy officer for Exodus, a C&W unit formed by the integration of Digital Island with the Exodus business.
The two sides have been battling over the core technology of systems that speed
delivery of content over the Internet for nearly two years.
Earlier this month, C&W sued Akamai and its subsidiary Sockeye Networks.
At issue in that complaint is C&W’s Host-to-Host Adaptive Routing Protocol (HHARP). HHARP detects network congestion and maps a route between a
customer’s origin servers and the edge of the Internet to quickly deliver text and images.
Internet packet routing is subject to problems, such as hardware and line failures, configuration errors, poor routing policies and congestion at “intersections.”
Without HHARP technology, these problems can take hours, sometimes days, to fix, C&W said.
