Cable and Wireless PLC (C&W) has filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in San Francisco, accusing Akamai Technologies Inc. of infringing a patent relating to optimal-routing technology, the London telecommunication services company announced. The suit is the second patent infringement lawsuit it has filed against Akamai in two months.
C&W is seeking to defend its U.S. Patent number 6,275,470, covering what C&W calls its host-to-host adaptive routing protocol (HHARP), used to detect Internet congestion and determine the best route between a customer’s origin servers and the edge of the Internet for the quickest delivery of data possible, the company said in a statement.
C&W also named Akamai affiliate Sockeye Networks Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, as a co-defendant in the suit.
The suit asserts that Akamai’s EdgeSuite and Sockeye’s GlobalRoute products and services infringe on the HHARP patent, C&W said.
A spokesman for Akamai, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the company is aware of the lawsuit and considers the claims to be totally without merit.
“We believe that C&W is again acting to divert attention from an upcoming permanent injunction, the final wording of which is expected to be issued later this summer. In that case, a jury found in December 2001 that the Cable and Wireless’ Footprint content delivery service infringes Akamai patent rights,” said company spokesman Jeff Young.
Footprint content delivery service is now operated under the Exodus brand as part of C&W, though in December 2001 its was operated by Digital Island Inc. which has since become a part of Exodus.
Representatives from C&W could not immediately be reached for comment.
Last month, C&W filed suit against Akamai in a Boston federal court in relation to its U.S. Patent number 6,415,280, covering various content-delivery algorithms and systems. The patent itself was also issued in July. That lawsuit claims that Akamai’s EdgeSuite content delivery networks (CDN) product and Akamaizer tool, which prepares content to be accessed by the CDN, infringes on C&W’s patent.
Akamai and C&W share a long history of issuing patent infringement suits against each other. Akamai has sued the U.K. company for infringing on two of its CDN-related patents.
C&W expects to engage in a “multi-year effort” against Akamai and other companies in an effort to defend its status as the first inventor of CDN technology, the company said.