I’ve been predicting this for months, and it looks like it’s finally happened: the commodity-networking companies are starting to do VoIP. Yesterday, both Netgear and Linksys announced deals with Vonage.

I haven’t seen any hardware specs from Netgear yet, but Linksys has two products; a wired router and a standalone FXS-to-SIP gateway. Apparently, the Linksys hardware uses Sipura’s technology, but sells for less then Sipura’s more-or-less equivalent hardware. At a list price of $59, Linksys’s PAP2 is the cheapest SIP adapter on the market. Heck, staples.com has it in stock for $49, and Vonage will rebate $40 of that if you sign up with them.

D-Link has a similar product on their website, but I haven’t heard much about it. Froogle claims that Boris is selling it for $25, which is a good example of why I don’t trust Froogle (congratulations on the wedding, Boris). I don’t actually know if D-Link is selling the DVG-1120 directly, but there’s at least one review online. D-Link also has a SIP phone on their website, but the Asterisk-users mailing list claims that it’s not available in the US yet.

So, all of the “name-brand” cheap home networking companies are now selling VoIP adapters. Presumably, we’ll see a wave of no-name SIP hardware hit in around 6 months, and the cost will drop to around $25. That, combined with a month’s free service, should make Vonage and their ilk grow like weeds without having to pay $400 per head to acquire customers.