We Get It: Calling Phones From Our Computers Will Be Damn Cheap
from the so-now-what? dept
Last week the story spread pretty quickly that Yahoo was launching integrated PC-to-phone calls (and vice versa) through their instant messenger program. The official press release should be popping out of Santa Clara in a few hours, but to make the story more interesting, Microsoft has timed it to announce their own version, based on their Teleo acquisition and a deal with MCI. At first glance, the Microsoft announcement falls short in almost every way to Yahoo's. Yahoo's prices are going to be less than half of Microsoft's (and Skype's) and rather than working with just one provider (MCI), it appears Yahoo is leveraging relationships with a number of different telco providers, giving them more flexibility. Still, these are just the early positioning moves before the big battle which has yet to come. The real question is whether any of these providers can really make their VoIP offering into a true platform -- opening up a real API to let others build voice into more applications, even (gasp!) competitors' applications. From what we've seen so far, it appears the early focus is on using voice to drive more people in as a destination site -- even when that makes very little sense. It's not surprising, but it means there's still a ways to go before we see some of the innovation that will eventually come out of all this. In the meantime, these two announcements, both of which everyone should have seen from about 50,000 miles away, should increase the head scratching over the amount of cash eBay threw at Skype. The battle over next generation voice offerings is just starting. It's not about cheap calls, though the press will go through that phase. For people not calling internationally who have big flat rate plans or unlimited calling, "cheap calls" aren't particularly appealing. The real battle is about how VoIP lets people do things they couldn't do before -- and we're only scratching the surface of that. Update: Even the smaller players are using today as the day. Apparently the Gizmo Project/SIPphone is also announcing their PC-to-phone offering, which looks to match Yahoo's pricing of one cent/minute. These price battles will obscure the real war for a while.
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Amazing future before us
John: So call tonight ok?
Silvia: What was your phone again?
John: johnjake.newyork.us
Silvia: Which network is this?
John: MS
Silvia: Damn we don't have access to this, will have to download yet another messenger. Url to the messenger?
John: dunno, gyahoogle it.
Silvia: Bah, probably will e-mail you anyway. Check often.
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Um...Gizmo ain't new
Of course, I could be confusing gizmo with one of the other ones I've tried...
Oh, and why not FREE calls? VOIPBuster does it! Sure, they lag like crazy, but that's not the point! :-P
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No Subject Given
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Re: No Subject Given
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If only VoIP truly worked.
Oh, I forgot Skype--the most over-hyped of the bunch. (Skype + Hype - Customer Service = Sk-Yikes!.) I submitted a trouble ticket to it over six weeks ago, have provided the information it requested several times, but have yet to hear one single word back from it. A read through their forums reveals that is not at all unusual.
If the old-school landline players have one undeniable edge, it is indeed customer service. No matter how bad one might think theirs is, *any* service is better than none at all--which every VoIP player obviously thinks is unnecessary. I guess at one to two cents per minute, one can obviously forget receiving support from anyone who must be paid to deliver it as their job.
Can you imagine having to go to often immature, clueless, rude, and non-paid forum helpers with BellSouth, Sprint, etc. when you have a problem? One thing VoIP has delivered is much greater appreciation for customer service I [once] thought was bad.
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Re: If only VoIP truly worked.
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C'mon
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Re: If only VoIP truly worked.
Actually, 5-9's refers to 99.999% availability, the reliability of the phone network. Taken as a whole, the circuit switched phone network in the United States is 99.999% available. Glitchs can't add up to more than 5 minutes 15 seconds per year.
Of course, that doesn't apply to every telephone and every circumstance. An idiot with a backhoe, a car hitting a telephone pole, or a local or regional disaster might take out some particular lines, but it is unusual that even a local exchange goes down for a substantial period of time.
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Re: If only VoIP truly worked.
It used to be easy to make calls from your computer. I don't understand what happened here. Maybe my mind has went to flubber, however I distinctly remember more than 5 yrs. ago using a headset w/ mic because my friends had cable but no telephone. I think many people have had the woll pulled over their eyes in this whole ordeal. Those dialers disappear or something? It would however be nice to forward calls to your broadband device in the future.
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Re: If only VoIP truly worked.
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dialing up the past
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