It has nothing to do with monopoly. First of all, there was a relationship between Sorenson media and Dlink, Dlink makes the VP for Sorenson media, and that Sorenson media provided video relay service (SorensonVRS), and other service that has to do with VP. Because of Dlink involvement, Dlink was able to develop routers that works well with VP. On other hand, Linksys used to be great with VP, that is UNTIL Cisco bought them out and decided to dedicate the development with NETmeeting and other videostream applications like these IM that is now using, VP happen to have different configuration from them and Cisco decided because of greater market with NETmeeting and other application and not want to deal with VP configuration. In fact, Sorenson actually tried to work with Cisco, but for some reason they refused to accomodate with VP requirements.
I wouldn't worry too much because technology will evolve anyway, and once the networking technology improves, these configuration requirement may become obsolete, UNLESS they (Sorenson) wants to improve the video quality/speed. If that happens, then we will be stuck with stupid requirement but will that happen? I doubt it.
