Vonage signs three contract to resell EarthLink's metro-scale Wi-Fi networks its voice customers: Interesting synergy, because it's a wholesaler-retailer relationship, not exactly a strategic partnership, because EarthLink is generally constrained to offer non-disriminatory wholesale access to all its metro-scale networks by contract with the cities it is working with. While EarthLink has its own VoIP service it's been selling, and is looking to expand, Vonage is a great reseller of this kind of service, as they will be able to leverage offer Wi-Fi-based VoIP phones this year with the greater coverage of a citywide network.
This highlights, once again, that people will need per-human-being or per-family accounts that many devices can access at different rates than full-price-per-device. This is Devicescape's whole point of its new service, and its only becoming more obvious over time.
What about the quality of the network? It's hard enough to run wVoIP in a company building or even your home. How well do they expect a public Wi-Fi network to perform? I mean, service quality wise. I can tolerate the ebbs and flows of the Mountain View Wi-Fi network when I'm checking my e-mail or even using a VPN back to work but I can't imagine that network supporting my Vonage calls. And thats not nearly the size of the proposed SF network.
Yikes!!!