Azulstar Networks today announced the launch of a metro-wide Voice over Wi-Fi telephone service that it claims is the world’s first. It operates over Rio Rancho’s converged city-wide Wi-Fi wireless network. The entire 103-square-mile territory of Rio Rancho will support VOIP (voice over IP) and QOS (quality of service) in addition to standard 802.11 wireless.
Azulstar developed the phone service in partnership with Ecuity, a leading enhanced Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) communications company. Meru Networks can pack into a single box up to 12 WLAN radios, all of which can operate at the same time. Meru is targeting enterprises that want to merge voice and WiFi networks.
“We believe this is the nation’s largest and most advanced city-wide Wi-Fi network, and the combination of Azulstar’s innovative Wi-Fi technology and Ecuity’s leading VoIP services will make Rio Rancho a model for city-wide Wi-Fi and the premier digital city” explained Jim Palenick, the city administrator.
Rio Rancho is a suburb of Albuquerque and has a population of 64,000. The city is often referred as the Silicon Mesa, due to the number of high tech companies that are headquartered there.
Wi-Fi / WiMAX fixed and mobile phone networks such as Azulstar’s Rio Rancho network are poised to transform the telephone industry by bypassing the traditional “local loop” and offering unified, IP-based networks capable of delivering a host of integrated services.
“By partnering with governments, technology leaders and other service providers, we are able to quickly design and deploy Wi-Fi / WiMAX mobile networks and services like the one we’ve deployed in Rio Rancho” said Tyler van Houwelingen, Azulstar CEO. “As more cities follow Rio Rancho’s lead, it’s going to have a profound impact on telco and wireless industry dynamics.
The Azulstar Voice over Wi-Fi telephone service is now available for residential, business and mobile telephone users throughout the 505 area code. Customers can select from a variety of fixed and mobile handsets, choose a local phone number or keep their existing number.
Features included with all calling plans include caller ID, call forwarding, voice mail over e-mail, multi-party calling, call waiting and Web based call control manager.
Pricing for residential fixed/mobile phone service has been set at $29.95/line for unlimited calling within the USA + Canada. The Azulstar Business phone services adds 4-digit inter company calling, a fax line and a Soft-PBX, which eliminates PBX hardware and provides a suite of centralized call control.
Azulstar expects typical small business to save between 40-60% off of their current bill and in most cases can leverage existing hardware. Later this year, Azulstar plans to add seamless roaming in and out of cellular CDMA and GSM networks.
The Azulstar city-wide Wi-Fi network was designed from the ground up to be a converged voice, data and video network and is the worlds largest and highest performing network yet constructed.
Some 200 high performance Wi-Fi access points provided by Meru Networks provide a seamless “cellular” Wi-Fi cloud across the city. Unlike other WLAN systems in which access points (APs) work independently and must be configured to deliver adjacent, non-overlapping coverage, Meru s family of WLAN products use this coordinated, cellular architecture in which all APs are coordinated and work together. End to end Quality of Service to standard Wi-Fi clients, 802.11a/b/g client access, and seamless mobility across the city at speeds up to 55mph with handoffs under 3ms are available in the nearly completed “city cloud”.
A pre-WiMAX backbone from Proxim Corporation connects the access points back to the Azulstar network operations center (NOC) and eventually the public Internet. Azulstar partner Ecuity Networks provides call transport and termination from the Internet onto the traditional phone network and vice versa. The service is based entirely around the SIP protocol and voice compression is accomplished using both the G.711 and the G.729 Codec.
DailyWireless has more on the Treasure of Rio Rancho and Switch Partners.
