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

So What?

[dbhankins]

Who cares who they partner with or what technologies they're pioneering?

They use pop-under ads that get past Firefox's popup blocker.

I'll never be one of their customers.

I own a Telecommunications Company

[Anonymous Coward]

My business faces ruin. Phone sales have dropped through the floor. People aren't buying half as many cellphones as they did just a year ago. Revenue is down and costs are up. My company has survived for years, but I now face the prospect of bankruptcy. Every day I ask myself why this is happening.

I bought the company about 12 years ago. It was one of those boutique phone companys that sell obscure, feature-rich plans that no-one uses, not even the people that buy them. I decided that to grow the business I'd need to aim for a different demographic, the family market. My company specialised in family ringtones - stuff that the whole family could listen to. I don't sell sick stuff like Marilyn Manson or cop-killer rap, and I'm proud to have one of the most extensive Christian rock sections that I know of.

The business strategy worked. People flocked to my company, knowing that they (and their children) could safely purchase ringtones without profanity or violent lyrics. Over the years I expanded the business and took on more clean-cut and friendly employees. It took hard work and long hours but I had achieved my dream - owning a profitable business that I had built with my own hands, from the ground up. But now, this dream is turning into a nightmare.

Every day, fewer and fewer customers enter my company to buy fewer and fewer cell-phones. Why is no one buying ringtones? Are people not interested in music? Do people prefer to watch TV, see films, read books? I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - VoIP is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three users world wide has VOIP. On The Internet, you can find and download hundreds of dollars worth of music in just minutes. It has the potential to destroy the music industry, from artists, to record companies to companys like my own. Before you point to the supposed "economic downturn", I'll note that the book company just across from my company is doing great business. Unlike ringtones, it's harder to copy books over The Internet.

A week ago, an unpleasant experience with pirates gave me an idea. In my company, I overheard a teenage patron talking to his friend.

"Dude, I'm going to put this ringtone on the Internet right away."

"Yeah, dude, that's really lete [sic], you'll get lots of respect."

I was fuming. So they were out to destroy the telecommunications industry from right under my nose? Fat chance. When they came to the counter to make their purchase, I grabbed the little shit by his shirt. "So...you're going to copy this to your friends over The Internet, punk?" I asked him in my best Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry voice.

"Uh y-yeh." He mumbled, shocked.

"That's it. What's your name? You're blacklisted. Now take yourself and your little bitch friend out of my company - and don't come back." I barked. Cravenly, they complied and scampered off.

So that's my idea - a national blacklist of pirates. If somebody cannot obey the basic rules of society, then they should be excluded from society. If pirates want to steal from the music industry, then the music industry should exclude them. It's that simple. One strike, and you're out - no reputable record company will allow you to buy another cellphone. If the pirates can't buy the ringtones to begin with, then they won't be able to copy them over The Internet, will they? It's no different to doctors blacklisting drug dealers from buying prescription medicine.

I have just written a letter to the FCC outlining my proposal. Suing pirates one by one isn't going far enough. Not to mention pirates use the fact that they're being sued to unfairly portray themselves as victims. A national register of pirates would make the problem far easier to deal with. People would be encouraged to give the names of suspected pirates to a hotline, similar to TIPS. Once we know the size of the problem, the police and other law enforcement agencies will be forced to take piracy seriously. They have fought the War on Drugs with skill, so why no

Boxen (off-topic warning...)

[KingSkippus]

I dunno, I've gotten semi-used to seeing it now, enough that I don't really think about it or slow down when I read it. Who knows? If everybody keeps using it, maybe it will someday become a legitimate plural for "box" and Brian Regan can feel all warm and gooey inside for adding a word to the English language!

everybody seems to use it without even knowing where it comes from

Isn't this true about almost every word that everybody uses?

I'm not trying to be a grammar pacifist or anything, but language does change over time, and it's not at all unusual for small groups to share an internal jargon. No one complains on Fark that "asshat" isn't a real word, it's just something that popped up and stuck.

I don't really like or hate "boxen," but if you want to get rid of it, you might as well try to get rid of stuff like "pwned," the "All your bases" joke, and even more mainstream things like "hacker," "bug," and emoticons. Personally, I'd rather get rid of the pronunciation of Linux as LIE-nucks once and for all.

I guess we've all got our pet peeves. A lady I work with writes e-mail as e'mail, and it bugs me so much that if that catches on, I think I'll just give up and kill myself. (For the record, e-mail is not a contraction, it is a hyphenated word, vaguely acronymical at best.)

your using "boxen" instead of "boxes" makes you look either like (1) you blindly follow a meme to computer-educated folks, and (2) an ill-educated person to everybody else?

How do you know he's not a Unix clustering professional?

At any rate, thanks for the etymology of the word. I didn't know that, and now it is kind of funny and makes sense.

Re:This is News?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Meme: Noun. The opposite of youyou.