Republic Wireless

Alyssa and I have been using two iPhones and the cheapest iPhone family plan AT&T offers. In order to avoid going over in minutes, I signed up for Skype and have been using it whenever possible. I've never been a huge fan of audio quality for cell phone calls, and Skype isn't much better.

Republic Wireless just came out with a beta program that I think is both a better deal and potentially a better service. It's $19/mo for unlimited calling and data, with a slight catch (more on that later): you need to do most of your calling over wifi. I signed up and received the phone a couple weeks ago.

The phone is nothing special, a LG Optimus running Android 2.3. It's maybe slightly smaller than my iPhone 3GS. I've been a big fan of the iPhone for a while, but the changes in iOS 5 have really had a negative impact on the user experience on a 3GS. Running sync processes in the background really slows the response time down, and I find myself having to either manually close everything or reboot the phone at least once a week. After using iOS and Android side by side for a week, they seem really similar. The iPhone still has a shinier UI with nicer fonts, and is really a tough phone, but I don't understand the Android vs. iOS blog wars. Anyway.

The audio quality over a wifi connection using Republic Wireless is awesome. I'd sign up just for that. Maybe there's an app and service that will let me get that kind of call quality on any Android/iOS device, I haven't looked. This will be a selling point for RW if they can make it past beta stage. The phone automatically tries to use wifi whenever possible. Luckily, none of the access points I use on a daily basis need any kind of web-based login, and the phone just seamlessly does the right ting. Since it's an Android phone and I've already ported my number to Google Voice, I just added the new phone's number to my Google Voice account and started receiving calls and texts on it. There have been some beta issues around Google Voice support over a cell connection and how texts are received, but RW is aware of these issues and is targeting the new year for their second over the air update.

There was some confusion around how the beta was marketed which has led to a modified TOS for the beta. I read the RW site as saying there was a limit to how much cell usage you could have in a month. Others read the language as saying cell use would be a percentage of wifi use with no limit. Republic Wireless saw the confusion and changed the terms of the beta to be truly unlimited: no limits on cell use, voice or data, for the duration of the beta.

RW is using the Sprint network for their cell service. They are backed by Bandwidth.com, a major supplier of, well, bandwidth, as well as SIP trunks and other phone services. I had been looking at Phonebooth Mobile before RW came out. RW will depend on the low cost of VoIP using their volume SIP rates to make money. The hard part will be figuring out the cell part of the equation. It's doubtful they can be profitable offering true unlimited cell voice and data at the $19/mo price point, but I'm close to turning my 3GS into an iPod Touch based on the cost and much higher audio quality.