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Yahoo! Messenger Gets Phone Service
prostoalex writes to tell us that Yahoo! has launched a new phone service attached to their Messenger service. From the article: "The calls have to be initiated from a PC, but can be made to traditional landline phones and cellphones. Yahoo customers can receive calls from those phones, as well. Yahoo will charge 2 cents a minute for domestic calls, on top of the monthly $2.99 fee. Per-minute charges to 180 other countries will vary. It won't charge to receive calls."
Screw $0.02/minute, Ventrilo is free and much less likely to be wiretapped!
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
I need clients that talk to one another, not 12 different clients that don't. Skype, Yahoo, Windows Messenger, AIM, Google Talk..hey you clowns, I can't run all these clients at once.
We still don't have effective Caller ID for VoIP. So who's going to take these calls from your computer besides people who *know* you are calling or your dentists office? You can't use it for anything but calling grandma. Don't get me wrong, VoIP on your system is a wonderful thing, but Skype was just worthless when I'd have to make a business call and my client would say to me "Oh, I didn't know +000001234 was you." I expect the same from Google, Yahoo, or any other player looking to break into the market. Until they have CallerID implemented correctly (and *not* hackable!) it's not ready for prime-time.
Just when you got used to 10 digit dialing, now even more ways to get a phone number. I'm sure we'll be running out of numbers in the next 10 years and see more digits added. Or will phone numbers become like social security numbers? You register and have one for life.
How many digits in a chinese phone number? Is their system capable of handling billions of numbers?
Phone service for $2.99 monthly won't make people run out and replace their traditional phones. But, "we see a continual chipping away at the traditional model," says Maribel Lopez, an analyst with Forrester Research. "And this really hurts the future phone business."
The future of the traditional model will continue to drift as it has been, to mobile phones and broadband digital services. Yet another milestone on the path to having a unified telecom service provider stick just one line into your home for everything.
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With their partnership with SBC/ATT? Last time I checked, sbc's dsl was "sbc-yahoo dsl". Wouldn't selling a voip level product be a stab in the back of your partner? Maybe it's just me.
How Jaded Are You?
Landlines can't call yahoo accounts. Read the summary, it says the calls have to be innitiated by the yahoo account.
The setup is like NAT, you can call out but they can't call in.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
and *not* hackable!
It's always hackable. Your grandma can hack caller id on a regular phone. Your standards are higher for the brand new technology?
Packet8 has most international calls for less than $0.10/minute, most of Europe for less than $0.05. I don't know where you are getting the $0.50/minute - even the old phone companies don't charge that much anymore...
From the summary:
The calls have to be initiated from a PC, but can be made to traditional landline phones and cellphones. Yahoo customers can receive calls from those phones, as well.
The way I read this, Yahoo customers can call landlines and cellphone, and can also receive calls from those phones (meaning landlines and cellphones) as well. If that is accurate, presumably Yahoo phone subscribers would need a phone number for their PC, unless the plan is going to work like a calling card or something, where people would call a central 800 number and dial in a code to connect to a particular Yahoo user. That seems way too cumbersome, though.
I have been having endless problems with Skype over my reasonably fast DSL connection. Calls getting dropped, sounding like crap, skype locking up my computer on an almost daily basis. I need some other service provider that provides quality calls, has inbound numbers, does voice mail, and lets me call land lines for reasonable prices. Some of the problems are skype, some voip, maybe some decent standard will come out that has QoS.
voip is a godsend to those of use who constantly need to make intercontinental phone calls on our own nickle. skype has saved me so much money - hell, i used it for a year's worth of hour-long conversations between thailand and canada ... and now between belgium and canada.
I can't speak for anyone else that may have or have tried Vonage, but it has been great for me. As soon as I got Vonage up (about 2 mins after I opened the box it came in) I called the local telco and told them where they could shove it. I don't normally like to burn bridges but I was pouring gasoline on that one while lighting the match.
I recommend Vonage to anyone with broadband, especially if they are fed up with MaBell.
I am Homer of Borg. Resistance is Fut.. Mmmmmmmm, Donuts!
China has a complex system.
There are some city with 10 digital number such as:Beijing, Shanghai. You have to dail 10 XXXX-XXXX. Attention, The 10 is area code and the 8 digital is your local number. Most of the cities in china have 3 area code with 7 local number just like North American and those cities are face the shortage of number, so they want to change the local to 8 digital.
for mobile, you have 135-XXXX-XXXX. the first 3 digital are limited to some different operator, such as 135,136 belong to china moblie,133 belong to CDMA network. The next 4 digitals used as area code which you can know where this calling coming from.
There are alot of change and many "new" technical. I had left china for 4 years, so just for your reference.
No Skype fanboi here, but MAN is their video and audio quality better than YM. Absolutely no comparison, whatsoever. The Yahoo servers are down most of the time and video simply refuses to work ('server too busy, try connecting later'), or when it does it's all choppy and frequently crashes the whole app - as for audio, it really isn't all that good. Haven't looked back since Skype released version 2.0 with added video, it works perfectly for me, under any circumstances.
Mind you, I'm only talking about PC to PC calls, so I'm basically complaining about something that is free, so this may conceivably be slightly off topic - but no less true. Ever since YM went from version 6 to 7, it all went downhill for them - the only good thing about it is the photo sharing and file transfer feature (which work WAY faster than Skype), and the basic chat. Video and audio - forget about it.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw