VoIP Price War Declared

gardel writes "Voxilla reports that a VoIP price war was declared today. An announcement that AT&T would drop its prices for its CallVantage Service from $34.99 to $29.99 per month was followed quickly by an announcement that Vonage would drop the price on its unlimited calling plan to $25 a month from the previous $29.99. Analysts say the price cuts show the VoIP market is not only competitive, but it's serious."

Comments

Still about $20 too much

[metamatic]

The problem I have with my phone service is that the fixed per-month charge is about 5x what I pay for the actual calls I make.

I'd much rather have more expensive calls, and a lower per-month fee. I have no trouble with paying 5 cents a minute to make a call; it's paying $25+ a month for no calls that pisses me off.

Re:Still about $20 too much

[bleckywelcky]

Imagine if we only had to pay $50 or $60 for a phone, internet, and cable combination service. That would be great. But I'm sure we would need more than the 1 local cable company we currently have in most areas to do this. The government should buy or seize (since cable companies have probably made back their investment in profits already) the broadband infrastructure or force the sharing of the infrastructure (as it has been with phone lines) to open up the markets to more providers. Then we could have 20 or 30 companies offering all these services together and prices would get pounded into the ground while the quality of services would keep rising. Man, that's a pipe dream.

Re:Still about $20 too much

[angle_slam]

Just did some calculations. At 3.9 cents for additional minutes, if you use less than 884 minutes per month, you're better off getting the 500 minute plan and paying overage charges.

Re:Still about $20 too much

[Anonymous Coward]

They call $30 and $25 a deal, thanks to the price wars?!

I use packet8.net and I pay $20/mo. If someone is paying more than $20, they're getting ripped off.

Re:Still about $20 too much

[extremescholar]

How about setting up your own Asterisk server (yes, it's Linux, but it works, get over it). Then you can use VoicePulse Connect! to get a cheap rate for an incoming line.

Re:Still about $20 too much

[pwinkeler]

With Voicepulse Connect http://www.voicepulse.com/ I pay $7.99/mo for an unlimited minute incoming phone number and 2.95 cents/min for outgoing calls (local or long-distance). Even with a wife and two daughters my call accounting tells me I would spend less just paying by the drink than my SBC local analog line at $34 (taxes, fees and caller-id included) by almost $20/mo!
In short, you'd be surprised how few minutes you really do use.
On top of that you might want to consider Voicepulse connect because I now get multiple incoming calls and multiple outgoing calls at no extra cost other than that the meter runs for outgoing calls.

The catch? You gotta run Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/ and get at least one FXS port card from Digium http://www.digium.com/.

Anything over $15/mo is robbery in my opinion

Re:Still about $20 too much

[Alrescha]

"I'd much rather have more expensive calls, and a lower per-month fee. I have no trouble with paying 5 cents a minute to make a call; it's paying $25+ a month for no calls that pisses me off."

I use 'iconnecthere.com'. I pay $8.95/month + 3.5c per minute.

This $8.95 includes:
a pots-number in the city I choose
unlimited incoming calls
caller-id
voice-mail (that I can listen to on my mac)

Call quality is generally good, once in a while some latency is noticable. There is no 911 service that I'm aware of - it wasn't on my list of required features.

A.

What about broadband?

[Flizesh]

Never see a price war with broadband.. esp. recently. Is it because of the monopolies had by Time Warner and other giants? Last sign of competition i've personally seen was TWC increasing from 2mpbs to 3 one year ago.

Another article...

[Anonymous Coward]

Claims this isn't true...

http://traceroute.zoy.org?voip

What's the 411 on VOIP?

[toupsie]

How is the quality of the VOIP services? Are there delays? Dropouts? Access to local 911? What happens when the power goes out in my house?

It still sounds expensive to me.

[genericacct]

I realize Americans have the all-you-can-eat mentality more so than the rest of the world, but is an unlimited domestic long-distance plan really the only way they can compete? I don't make enough long distance calls to justify that much for land-line voice service, and I have broadband. I suppose it's cheaper than a POTS line plus unlimited long distance, but of the people with broadband, I don't see a huge market to compete within. Please enlighen me if this is really a fast-growing market segment, because I just don't see it.

Didn't lower the costs for all plans..

[sisukapalli1]

I have a plan with vonage that was 25 bucks when the premium plan was 35. The premium plan fell from 35 to 30 to now 25, but my plan has stayed at the same level at 25 bucks. It is an unlimited local plus 500 national minutes free. The remaining option is a basic 500 minutes, which was at 15, and still is at 15.

For some reason, Vonage doesn't want to cut the price on the basic and intermediate plans :(

S

know what's funny

[Skadet]

know what's funny? maybe 5 years ago I used Dialpad.com... VoIP, 'cept through your soundcard... and you could call actual phone numbers. (this was in the day before free long distance was a staple in the cell phone community).

The funny part?

It was free.

HA HA! HA HA HEH!

[techsoldaten]

When I signed up for Vonage, it cost me $40 a month which was a huge savings off the $60 a month I was paying for traditional service.

Now the price is going down to $25 a month? This is amazing. I was briefly considering building my own VoIP system, this news makes it not the worth the trouble to go out and buy the parts I would need.

Now I have time to focus on all the other projects I've been thinking about.

M

Re:what value is added for $25 per month?

[Trigulus]

I am a vonage user. Most of my friends, family, coworkers, businesses I deal with etc.. are not uber geeks and do not wish to be forced to communicate with me in some strange and unusual way (IM, computer phones,proprietary sip services etc.) With vonage they pick up their phone, dial my number and we communicate. Anyone out there on traditional phone lines can reach me without any inconvienience to them. And it costs me very little compared to the same service from those traditional phone lines. You dont seem to live in the real world or at least communicate in it. At work we have completely switched our phone lines to vonage. 15 lines!. We have a 100MB internet connection so we dont even feel the lost bandwidth but we save over $2000 per month! and our customers have no clue. in fact most of the employees are unaware of the switch. To me that says it all. My only complaint is vonage limits a "company" account to 10 lines so we had to set up 2 accounts. And that is very minor.

Have Vonage, will probably drop in favor of Skype.

[rthille]

I've got Vonage, but since I'm on DSL, I'm paying for a phone number anyway, and with the amount of calls I make Skype is a much better deal.
Now if only I could get some hardware (like my vonage/cisco ATA) which would do Skype instead of vonage....

Re:What minority?

[llefler]

It could also be the lack of reliable e911 service. Or the fact that when the power or cable go out, you'd lose VOIP but not POTS.