Let's hope the market responds and competitors are attracted to this niche.
Once the consumer gets the product home, they start using it. I've done a lot of telecom work, including rolling out large scale VoIP deployments for publicly traded companies. VoIP is great when it's well engineered. When you slap it on "any old network", it sucks. Horribly.
Users of this phone are going to experience horrible call quality at some point. VoIP calls over a home wireless network with zero QoS makes this a question of "when", not "if". The first time someone sends an email with a large attachment or Dropbox uploads a large file while someone is on their Republic phone, the house of cards will come crashing down. Don't believe me? Run a continuous ping to google.com and upload a large file on cable or DSL.
So, the message to entrepreneurs, executives, and investors is that consumers want a cheaper cell phone plan...
I can think of only one response: duh!
This is a prime example of an "execution counts" scenario. If Republic is successful, it will be because they solved some very difficult technical problems like automatically switching to the cellular network when network conditions degrade. I don't know of anyone doing that though. It would seem they have to solve this problem somehow. What happens if you're on a WiFi call and you leave the network area? If they pull it off, major kudos to them.
Other VoIP companies with large deployments face similar issues. Vonage (last time I used them) prefers that you use their router as your primary, because it has QoS rules built in. Comcast's VoIP solution works fantastically because their network is really well engineered for VoIP.
If Republic's plan is to simply hand a phone to users and hop on to their WiFi network, I'd anticipate catastrophic return rates and customer dissatisfaction.
Then again, people are cheap. Republic may find that there is a viable community of cost conscious consumers who will tolerate the occasional bad call in exchange for a low, low price.
you consider that flawless?
they don't mention wifi coverage anywhere on their site.
The land-line equivalent of this is Magic-Jack, though Republic do at least offer CDMA, or will until they discover their customers are breaking their business model.
...i'm paying for only the 300Mb/month on sprint?
as with magicJack, this will only be consumed by the folks still paying AOL for internet.
I have numbers from companies that are more reliable and offer more value than this. And use gvoice for my spam numbers
If they prepared for, say, 1200, and got 3700, they were overwhelmed, but it doesn't necessarily indicate there's that much of a market. We don't know enough about their infrastrucure or estimates to know if this really signals an insatiable demand.
I think it probably does, but I've been wrong at reading signals like this before.