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Yahoo Readies New VoIP Service
Rob writes "Yahoo is readying to capture a larger piece of the VoIP market and will announce a
new VoIP product during the next two weeks. The new service would be comparable to
Skype Technologies SA's, said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Wall Street
researcher Piper Jaffray Co, which makes a market in Yahoo stock. The impending move by
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo into the VoIP
arena would potentially be disruptive."
Good Business Move. Diversification of product portfolio. Nice portal, Search, VoIP, Instant Messaging.. what next?
Sony has millions of people playing their online games, just like Yahoo, you'd figure they'd see integration of VoIP into games at this point in the VoIP gold rush as a logical first step into the market.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Will I be able to get VoIP through my SBC/Yahoo! service?
The only company I have found that is interested in actually serving the customer so far is braodvoice. They will let me use Asterisk or my own equipment and let me retain control of my equipment. All the others I found refuse to. People ask me about Vonnage all the time because they advertise heavily. I always warn them away from vonnage because of the almost outright hostility I recieved from them when I was asking about using my own gear... I was accused of being a terrorist by one of their CSR's after explaining what Asterisk was and could do for me and my family and then was promptly hung up on.
If the company will not let you use your own equipment and retain control over it if you desire then I strongly suggest not using them or reccomending them to anyone.
I know that Yahoo will be the same way, Packet8 started with the same hoopla that yahoo is using right now and they also are hostile to educated users after promises of "being for the techie guy"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's good to see VoIP starting to take off... cell phones are starting to come WiFi enabled and our wireless network transfer rates keep getting faster and able to travel longer distances. Soon (within the next 10 years or so) we won't have to pay the exhorborant fees we are currently paying to these wireless carriers (Verizon, Sprint, Cingular, T-Mobile, etc) for X amount of minutes a month. It will be interesting to see what will happen once this technology becomes popular and everyone begins making calls over the internet. I for one can't wait to do my part by helping to slashdot something with my cell phone.
www.gizmoproject.com
A open STANDARD service that is currently in beta, and runs off of the open standard of SIP.
$sig$
This one is pretty free;
http://www.voipbuster.com/
You have to get a credit of 1 euro and you're set to go (they let you preview it for a minute if you don't have any credit).
I'm sure this is temporary, I can't see how they can keep all those countries for free for a long time.
- sigs are for wimps.
Try Here:
http://www.fwdout.net/web/
I fail to see where the "VoIP market" is supposed to be. The software is free, you don't need any central servers for VoIP, and you are already paying someone for your Internet connectivity.
The only services you might pay for are VoIP-to-POTS gateways (to talk to those stuck in the 20th century), and directory services. The former may have a brief growth phase but then will gradually disappear. The latter can be piggy-backed on all sorts of existing free services.
In Japan, Yahoo BroadBand offers free calls to other Yahoo customers by plugging your phone into your router. The rates to call America are also staggeringly cheap (¥4/minute if memory serves). Yahoo has had this technology for a while, at least two years by my reckoning. It's good that they're going to use it elsewhere though, I guess.
The real question is- will this service work with the Asterisk PBX? They say Yahoo VoIP is based on SIP, but is it open like FreeWorldDialup or closed like Vonage?
How does copying someone else's VoIP fit in with Yahoo's business model? The way I see it, Yahoo is not in the business of person-to-person communication, it's in the business of making it easy to access knowledge of all sorts.
I can see how the IM client helps them, but software VoIP is different from IM - it's more computationally intensive, it depends heavily on the presence of broadband, and it's (in my opinion) a lot less versatile for those in a computer environment. You couldn't use this stuff in a cube environment. You can't be anonymous with voice. You can't enclose pictures or multitask easily.
For that reason it's really hard to distinguish yourself with VoIP - there's really only one thing a provider needs to do, which is get two people talking with reasonable voice quality. Once you're there, how does Yahoo! differ from anyone else?
Most importantly, how does getting people to use the Yahoo! client get people to do something that makes Yahoo! richer? Again - banner advertising won't work because people using the client aren't really looking at their computer screens.
It's hard to conceptually connect Yahoo! and any sort of VoIP client. I'm open to any suggestions of how it might work, though...