Vonage Finally Goes Wireless

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Vonage Finally Goes Wireless

July 20, 2005

By Staff

In just four days, Vonage will begin selling wireless phones for use with its service – albeit months later than expected – with hardware from only one of its three anticipated vendors ready to roll and not even the promised WiFi-based hardware at that. The VoIP carrier says a 5.8 GHz phone from VTech will be on the shelves at more than 8,000 retailers, and Vonage is touting the widgetry as “the world’s first broadband enabled cordless phone system.”

By now, Vonage had expected to be on the market with a WiFi-based cordless VoIP phone from UTStarcom, promised for delivery in the spring/summer time frame (TelecomWeb news break, Jan. 6). A Vonage spokesman today said only that, as of now, “we are expecting the UTStarcom Wi-FI phone to hit the market in the October time frame.” No reason was given for the delay.

There’s also no sign of a digital cordless phone system from Viseon that Vonage acknowledged back in January as coming down the track.

Unlike the basic VoIP adapters Vonage and many other VoIP carriers give away for free – often after a rebate covering 100 percent of the purchase price – the VTech phone will cost consumers $150 at the store. Users get $50 rebates after 60 days of service. The price of the phone includes two handsets, with additional handsets costing $50 each. The system can accommodate a total of four handsets.

The VTech phone, designated Model IP-8100-2, appears essentially to be a retrofit of existing 5.8 GHz phones that work on standard telephone systems, with VoIP capability added to the base unit via a Texas Instruments TNETV1060 VoIP chipset. The base simply plugs into a broadband connection, and it includes an integrated router. Basically, the unit is for in-home fixed use, like any wireless phone system.

Far sexier is the unit expected from UTStarcom, which is supposed to work anywhere there is WiFi available. UTStarcom had been showing prototypes of the unit, designated the Model F-1000, at the Consumer Electronics Show last January.

Vonage also started working with Boingo Wireless in October 2004 to set up a system where a user with a WiFi handset could receive calls to a VoIP phone number literally anywhere in the world WiFi is available.

Meanwhile, despite Vonage’s claim to have “the world’s first broadband enabled cordless phone system” (a prepared statement attributed to Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Citron), U.K. research house Infonetics Research today released a report detailing last year’s sales of broadband-enabled cordless phones – obviously, Vonage was not first – and predicting the market will be explosive.

According to Infonetics Research, about 143,000 WiFi VoIP handsets were sold in 2004, worth a total of $54.7 million, including $6.7 million in sales of handsets that work with both WiFi and standard cellular telephony.

Those totals admittedly are tiny when compared to the total wireless telephony market, but not to fear. According to Infonetics, “WiFi VoIP handsets represent a small market currently, but one with great potential. WiFi capability will eventually become a common feature in cellphones, just as it is becoming standard in laptops today.”

"Some challenges remain, such as QoS, roaming across different wireless platforms and the relatively short range of WiFi signals, but with vendors currently addressing these issues, it is likely we'll be at the foot of the adoption bell curve by mid-2006," says Richard Webb of Infonetics, author of the report.