Forget about Wi-Fi VoIP, Vonage going WiMax

kamikaze-Tech writes "Being reported on the Vonage VoIP Forum in an article entitled Vonage, Wimax Provider Team Up it appears Vonage is partnering with TowerStream to allow you to make calls up to 30 miles away via WiMax. WiMax, another name for the 802.16 standard for wireless broadband, has a range of up to 30 miles and can deliver broadband at a theoretical maximum of 75 megabits per second, which is more than 20 times the speed of the fastest wired broadband available commercially. WiMax serves as a partial successor to the popular Wi-Fi wireless protocol, which works over far shorter distances, measured in feet rather than miles."

Comments

interference

[mo]

There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of wifi access points in a 30 mile radius of me right now. With wimax, all of these will be interfering with my signal. Can someone explain to me how I would get anything better than modem-like speeds with all of this interference?

Beat them, or join them?

[Lewisham]

The most interesting part of this deal is that Vonage are cutting a little niche around cell phone providers, just like they have done landline providers.

But I'm interested to know whether we're going to see Vonage take an agressive pricing stance against cell phone providers as they did the landline behemoths, or whether they're going to join the cartel, and effectively price consumers as much as possible, because, hey, the other guys are doing it too.

I guess we'll have to see what happens when WiMax becomes a more realistic prospect price-wise.

75 Mbs per customer?

[Malc]

Is that 75 Mbs for WiMax per customer, or is it shared by all of the users?

How many simultaneous connections?

[billstewart]

Sure, it's nice to get some combination of wide area, long distance, and high bandwidth (though obviously you don't get max bandwidth and max area simultaneously), but how many simultaneous connections can it support with reasonably latency performance? For VOIP, you don't need a lot of bandwidth per user, typically 22-80kbps depending on your choices of codecs, but if you're handling a lot of customers over a wide area, you're going to need a lot of simultaneous connections. Will that number change if some of your users are also burning high bandwidth?

Interference is less of a problem than some people think. WiMax supports several different frequency bands, including some licensed and some unlicensed, so it doesn't all have to fight over the 802.11b/g 2.4 GHz band.

Spreading themselves too thin

[DogDude]

This may be the death of Vonage. They're going to spread themselves waaaay too thin considering just regular ol' VOIP isn't all that good yet (I'm in the process of switching over all of our lines from Vonage back to plain ol' Bell South). This is a classic case of overextension, from what I can tell. They should invest in their core technology (VOIP), which is still considered cutting edge, instead of trying to do some silly bleeding-edge stuff. I used to think that Vonage had the Next Big Thing, even if their current VOIP service isn't quite there yet. Now I think they're going to burn it (cash) on this silly, waaaay too new technology before they've perfected what pays their bills.

Re:No...

[anthony_dipierro]

That'd be about a T1's rate for about a T1's price.

And most likely without a T1s quality of service.

Where this may work....

[narduk]

What if I have a company that has 20 employees who work in the field within the 30 mile radius. Suddenly I have 20 cell phones with unlimited minutes for $600 a month. $30 bucks a customer. Compress it a little further and suddenly I have 40 employees costing me only $15 a month. That sounds nice. If coverage is good, bye bye T-Mobile.