[Asterisk-Users] Techfone VOIP phone

[Steve Underwood]

Scott Lambert wrote:

>On Sat, Jul 19, 2003 at 01:01:52AM +0800, Steve Underwood wrote:
>  
>
>>That looks a bit like this one:
>>
>>http://www.planet.com.tw/product/product_intro.php?menu_id=3
>>
>>rather expensive to me. These things have less DSP and compute to do 
>>than an ADSL modem, and should cost no more. That would make a 
>>reasonable price about US$50-60. I suspect it won't be long before we 
>>    
>>
>
>Market volume means a lot to prices...  So far, the VoIP market is way
>behind the DSL market.
>
That seems a rather US view of things. The practice is Asia, and 
particularly in Taiwan, has generally been to cut prices to the bone on 
new things, and try to drive market volumes from there. They made ADSL 
cheap when the volumes were still modest.

I'm not convinced the volumes are that small. I believe Cisco alone has 
shipped several million lines of VoIP. That would be more than enough to 
get the Asian makers interested in aggressive cost reduction work. It 
doesn't need a lot of complex expensive and risky development. It 
doesn't, for example, require complex custom chips, as the DSL business 
did. An OMAP chip, for example, has most of what you need, except the 
ethernet port. Those are some of the biggest volume chips made, so 
prices are very keen.

Regards,
Steve