A recent competition to find the next design for the future of VoIP phones and adapters was taken away by Broadcom and Vonage. Broadcom also announced a 7.2-Mbit/s chpset supporting the next-generation HSDPA standard.

However, while the design win with Vonage was significant, the two companies don’t appear to be in exclusive working environment. Vonage described Broadcom as A partner, rather than an exclusive technology provider. However, the deal opens up Broadcom to serve and existing base of about a million subscribers, as well as new customers. Vonage on the other hand, “already has a relationship with [Texas Instruments} and that’s not going away,” a Vonage spokeswoman said.

“The relationship will provide Vonage with opportunities needed to develop and work with manufacturers to produce new integrated devices compatible with the Vonage network,” Vonage said in a statement.

“Recognizing the need for small businesses and consumers to have a myriad of options when selecting devices to place upon their networks, Vonage is excited to partner with Broadcom to continue to offer communications choices,” said Daniel Smires, senior vice president of Vonage Network, in a statement. “Broadcom’s strong architecture and technological expertise will open new paths to add new devices to our product portfolio, furthering the choice for subscribers signing up for our service plans.”

Broadcom’s 7.2-MBit High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) chipset, which is currently sampling to “early access customers” for $30 for 10,000-unit quantities, is also in the lime-light. The BCM2152 HSDPA baseband processor also supports up to a 5-megapixel camera, multimedia encode and decode at 30 frames per second at CIF or QVGA resolutions, 64-voice polyphonic ring tones, and integrated audio amplifiers to support full duplex speaker phones, plus enough horsepower to run digital-rights-management applications. Wow.

HSDPA is a next-generation telecommunications service, being released only to special places like the Isle of Man. In 2004, Broadcom decided to support HSDPA rather than the WiMAX standard. Which proved to be a good move.