Unwire Vonage
Based on my recent experience with Vonage, Aaron's and Seuss' testimonials, and the real cost savings of about $500 over the year, I signed up for the VOIP service over the weekend.
Today, I see that Vonage has plans to ship a WiFi phone, and the traveller in me is drooling. With such a phone, all I will need is a wifi connection to make and receive local calls to North America, and I won't need to drag a laptop and headset and pay fees on Skype to call landlines. Awesome.
I wonder, though, how it will handle authentication on a T-Mobile Hotspot / Starbucks-type service. The phone Vonage will distribute is made by UTStarcom, and their F1000 wifi phone spec sheet makes no mention of a browser, which is necessary to input a username and password. As a potential customer, I'm hoping they've thought through the common use cases for the phone ("I want to use this phone at Starbucks").
Still, Vonage is headed in the right direction. I can't imagine that the folks at T-Mobile are thrilled about Vonage using its own broadband network to disrupt T-Mobile's mobile business. The effect likely won't be felt initially, but wifi ubiquity is growing, VOIP is doing nothing if not disrupting traditional phone service.
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Comments (Post | Latest)
I've been considering Vonage for a while now. My mom got it (yes -- gasp -- my mother has actually embraced a new technology before I have!) and it seems neat. She leaves her computer on all the time for it, but I didn't think that was a requirement.
I have Broadvoice VOIP who have been offering a "softphone" for a while now, though that may be different from this wireless one. Anyway, from what I've heard hotspots block the ports that VOIP usually works on. Couldn't be that easy, huh?