, which is owned by , sold out its initial allocation of handsets in less than two hours when it launched its WiFi-first phone service last . Republic Wireless has had tens of thousands of potential customers cooling their heels on a waiting list since that time.

"When we opened for business we had, literally, hundreds of thousands of folks melt our site down and sold out our entire inventory of handsets," David Morken, Bandwidth.com CEO, told PCWorld.

"At that time," Morken continued, "we started working on delivering great service to those folks and getting to a point where we could scale massively and reopen. That's what we're announcing today."

Republic Wireless is built on a WiFi-first model. When one of its subscribers makes a phone call or accesses a network, its customized handsets first tries to make the connection through a WiFi network. If that fails, it will then use a cellular network. Republic's cellular partner is Sprint.