This morning, if you are old fashioned enough to buy newspapers, you might have across some weekend inserts from major retailers, and somewhere inside you will find an offer too good to pass up, that is if you were planning to sign-up for Vonage and were in market for a new wifi router. (Vonage Forum has lot more details.)
Linksys has started pushing a new router, WRTP54G, which has two VoIP ports for about $129 a pop. Vonage is going to give about $100 in rebates for the product if you sign-up for their service, while retailers and Linksys are going to kick in the rest. You will have to trade in your old router, which Linksys will gladly crush and pulverize for you. It is pre-configured to get you making Vonage calls very quickly. WRTP54G two port routers belongs to the newly designed product line the Cisco subsidary has been showing off lately.
This clearly is a win-win for Cisco. It gets to push a lot of boxes, and the campaign is paid for by retail partners. It gets to record the revenues, Vonage gives out the rebates, and at $100, Vonage’s acqusition costs are much lower than its typical costs. Well everybody is happy happy! (Of course if you turn blind eye to the fact that cable guys are kicking some serious ass in VoIP business, and folks like 2Wire are starting to ship gateways with built-in ATAs.)
To your parenthetical on cable and gateways with built-in ATAs: three weeks ago I noted that Cablevision was giving out Motorola Surfboard SBV5120s with built-in eMTA to customers (like me) who didn’t have Optimum Voice.