The buying public sees $19/month first and foremost, and the majority of consumers will look no further. Cheap sells, but it's a short term play.

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.

I don't think I agree that VOIP on home IP networks will suck. I have 15 Mb with Cox. I can't see it being overwhelmed unless I have a torrent running. We have control over our home networks. I am paying $80 for 2 lines for only voice. I would love to save $40 a month.

And hopefully find a better solution, more importantly.

Any complaints about their solution? It seems good from where I'm sitting, assuming Sprint has good coverage.

It is basically a hack that combines VoIP over WiFi with Sprint cellular service, the latter of which is limited as described in the TOS.

I'm not understanding what the complaint in that is, exactly. Is it that the Sprint/cellular side of the usage is limited while the wifi usage is not?

Yes, and while I can understand why, I hope others will find a better solution.

The AT&T base iPhone plan has 450 minutes, (vs. 550 cellular, unlimited wifi here) for $40 plus $5 for 250 texts plus $15 for 200 MB or $25 for 2 GB. That's a total of $60/month at minimum. I really don't see what the complaint is here.

they would have to implement a wifi network as ubiquitous as wireless coverage.

you consider that flawless?

they don't mention wifi coverage anywhere on their site.

All the articles I've seen about this provider say that the price is low because they expect to utilize WiFi for a significant proportion of calls, not supplied by Republic, but supplied by the cable or DSL provider, in my case AT&T UVerse.

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.

You're paying 1/3 of an equivalent cellular plan on AT&T and Verizon. You don't have to be a luddite to see that as attractive.

I have magic jack but after I initially installed it I never used it. The service is terrible and I wouldn't be surprised if they had vacuum tube mainframes and tape drives running thier repeaters. Having said that, magic jack is extremely valuable for one thing: a number I can quickly forward to any phone I please. That's why I keep the phone number. Once I need a number for people to call I can have the magic jack number listed, and simply forward it to whatever number I'm using at the time(though it won't forward internationally).

This is how I use Google Voice.

No offense, but in voip terms you are "the folks that still pays AOL"

I have numbers from companies that are more reliable and offer more value than this. And use gvoice for my spam numbers

Not really. I have the number for 5 years and I don't have to pay a dime for it again until the renewal. Plus once it forwards the call it goes off their switchboard so I don't have a problem with the miserable call quality magic jack is famous for. Who knows if I'll renew(or if the company will even be in business) when the time comes but until then I've got a number anyone can call effectively for free.

Did you read the site at all? It's a low end sprint plan + free seamless wifi calling. Universal wifi is in no way required.

While I want to agree, it may just been they were wholly underprepared for even a moderate amount of customers.

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.