From GigaOm this morning comes news of Vonage’s deal with EarthLink to resell wireless Internet access in cities where EarthLink has a citywide Wi-Fi network:From GigaOm this morning comes news of Vonage’s deal with EarthLink to resell wireless Internet access in cities where EarthLink has a citywide Wi-Fi network:
Vonage has signed a three-year deal to buy Internet service wholesale from EarthLink, and then resell the Wi-Fi access with some woo-hoo and the Vonage brand name. The release also says that Vonage “plans to provide hardware, such as a wireless modem device, and other complementary software tools to customers that will be using the service as an alternative to DSL or cable modem access.
EarthLink’s model in SF and other cities is to sell Internet access directly to end users (retail) and to other ISPs (wholesale). To my knowledge, Vonage is the first company to announce a wholesale deal with EarthLink.
I am very pleased to see that companies other than the incumbents are taking advantage of the open access model adopted EarthLink and the cities it is unwiring (such as SF). This is a significant step towards more competition in the market for broadband services in the US. This may force the cable and telecom companies to buy wholesale access from EarthLink to compete with Vonage’s mobile VOIP offering in cities.
Read the press release here.
Posted by Esme Vos
Technorati Tags:
voip, wireless, wi-fi, municipal wireless, muni wi-fi, citywide wi-fi, muniwireless, broadband, vonage
There is no way that VOIP is going to work properly over a wireless only network that is not backed by a widespread fiber and/or cable broadband backbone. Once thousands of people are out there in the streets trying to make WiFi/VOIP phone calls, a wireless only system will slow to a snails crawl, or worse, completely lock up all over the place.
This is just more neo-libertarian smoke and mirrors meant to fool us into capitulating to the private ownership of what should clearly be a public asset (a public broadband internet utility) with lots of attention and revenue put into upgrading that public system for high quality broadband uses.
Eric Brooks