CommsDesign: VoIP chip targets home gateways

How many years will it be? I still believe in a "home gateway" that will serve as both a central hub for in-home communications and applications as well as the gatekeeper to external networks – be they the current, data-only broadband connection, or tomorrow's voice/video/data streams.

Greg sent me an article about Texas Instruments' new VoIP gateway chip, the TNETV1060. So "how long?" is the first question that springs to mind. (yes, I'm a bit jaded from my time at NT – caught in the dot-bomb bubble, I had visions of some this cool/useful stuff actually coming to fruition soon). The price is given as "$15[US] each in lots of 10,000 for a chip supporting four channels of voice". I admit to not really knowing what that works out to in terms of what kind of prices (increases) we would see for gateways. Say a full-featured, non-wireless gateway costs $100CDN today. These would maybe start shipping at $200CDN, then?

But of course, then there's the ongoing subscription and potential mail-in/subsidy angle. I would think that these voice gateways would ship with activation or actual tie-ins to somebody like Vonage. Or maybe cheap-o vendors like LinkSys might actually piggy back on some free services, like Skype or FWD. They did this with dynamic DNS services from DynDNS.

This is part of the long term Archive, originally published on

Categories: Home Server, VoIP

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