RNKVoIP Launches Lifetime Phone Service Plans for One-Time Fee
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DEDHAM, Mass. --(Business Wire)-- Dec. 6, 2004 -- First-of-its-Kind Offer Liberates Consumers from a Lifetime of Phone Bills with One Payment of $999.
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A beta of a new service launched by Skype Wednesday night will allow any user with the most current version of the popular communications client charge for voice and video calls placed to their account.
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Telecommunications giant tries to attract consumers who make few long-distance calls with a $20-per-month local plan.
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Subscribers of the company's Net phone service can get information on park locations, public transit, and so on.
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Skype is now offering an unlimited calling plan that will allow users to make calls to both regions for a period of 12 months for under $30 USD, in an effort to get more of its 136 million plus global users to sign up for premium services.
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Vonage, the U.S. pioneer of low-cost phone service over Internet broadband connections, on Tuesday said it was working with a phone maker to offer a "Wi-Fi" handset for subscribers to use at home or around town.
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Comcast is launching cellular service for its subscribers that will deliver a host of cable and telephone services on a single bill.
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Skype to start charging for VoIP calls to regular phones, computer-to-computer calls to remain free.
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New service lets consumers access an all-in-one mailbox from anywhere with a phone or the Internet.
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In a move that could help small and medium-size businesses save money, telecom carrier XO Communications has rolled out a new pricing model for VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) services based on the bandwidth a business uses, instead of the number of lines.The pricing model, announced Wednesday along with expansion of XO&#39;s VoIP offerings, allows U.S. business customers to set a price based on an IP port speed ranging from 1.5Mbps to 45Mbps, instead of the number of lines used. There are additional costs for long-distance calling plans and additional features.&quot;With IP, voice is just another application over the IP backbone,&quot; said Nic Jackson, XO&#39;s director of voice and converged services. &quot;When we put a T1 [connection] out to the customer premise, it really doesn&#39;t matter to us, or to the customer really, how they use that T1, as long as they have enough bandwidth to manage their voice and data needs. Why would we price differently for a voice channel vs. a data channel? It just doesn&#39;t make sense in this new IP world.&quot;Pricing starts at about $400 to $550 a month for 1.5Mbps service, depending on location and based on a three-year contract, Jackson said. A basic long-distance calling plan would cost an additional $60 a month. XO also offers one-year and five-year contracts.The new pricing model could cut costs for companies, particularly small and medium-size businesses, said Lisa Pierce, an analyst with Forrester Research. For a T1 line, a business with volume of about 54 calls per hour would be necessary for the XO pricing to make sense, she said.&quot;It looks like a pretty good deal,&quot; Pierce said.However, businesses interested in the plan should inquire whether the service is being provided over XO&#39;s own backbone or whether the carrier is buying access from others, Pierce said. In some cases, the rented network access can cause outages, she said.In addition, businesses should have a good idea about their current and future voice use before signing a contract based on bandwidth, Pierce recommended. &quot;They need to really have a handle on their traffic to do that,&quot; she said. &quot;And a lot of companies don&#39;t.&quot;XO will help customers determine their bandwidth needs, Jackson said. The bandwidth pricing can help simplify customer decisions about what kind of calling services they need, she said.In addition, XO, in Herndon, Virginia, announced it has expanded two of its VoIP offerings.The company has launched its XO IP Flex service, which allows customers to use traditional PBXes or multiline, key telephone systems to connect to XO&#39;s VoIP services. The new service, which replaces XO&#39;s XOptions Flex offering, includes unlimited site-to-site calling, voicemail and dynamic bandwidth allocation, allowing full use of the IP circuit for data when voice lines are idle. IP Flex also offers bandwidth of up to 10M bps, compared to 3M bps under the old service, Jackson said.XO also announced the nationwide availability of its IP SIP VoIP service, which delivers voice and data services to businesses with IP PBX systems over a single connection. XO launched IP SIP in October in six U.S. markets.&quot;What this means is a much broader portfolio than we had, say 18 months ago,&quot; Jackson said.
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Strata8 Networks, which officially opened its doors for business on Thursday, is offering a new twist on helping enterprises to lower their cell phone costs.The company, which has its own cellular spectrum licenses, offers enterprises cellular service inside of their corporate offices at a flat rate. Strata8 customers place a small base station in their building to provide coverage to workers using standard cell phones. The phones connect to the corporate cellular network while in the office but roam onto a commercial network elsewhere.The Bellevue, Washington, company is unique among others offering products that extend cellular coverage indoors in that Strata8 uses its own wireless spectrum. The spectrum, in the 1900MHz band, is the same kind used by most of the nationwide mobile operators and is owned by Strata8&#39;s parent company, Wirefree Partners.Enterprises pay $25 per user per month for the service, which includes unlimited calling to co-workers in the organization as well as to any other Strata8 customer. The base station connects to the enterprise&#39;s existing phone system, so long-distance and international calls cost the same as they would from a desk phone.The service should allow customers to save money by cutting back on their cell-phone service plans, according to Andy Wilson, executive vice president of marketing for Strata8. Craig Mathias, an analyst with the Farpoint Group, said many reports have shown that more than half of calls made from within offices are made over cell phones.But while calls from desk phones are generally cheaper than calls made from cell phones, companies should look at various factors to determine whether Strata8 would save them money, Mathias said. For example, some enterprises may not to be able to negotiate lower rates than they already get from their cell phone provider, so Strata8 would end up being an additional cost.Instead of Strata8, an enterprise could use a converged Wi-Fi and cellular service, where calls over the Wi-Fi networks are free and Wi-Fi access points are relatively inexpensive. However, that setup could require many Wi-Fi access points and also requires end-users to choose from just a few expensive phones currently available to work with such systems, he said.In addition, Wi-Fi networks use unlicensed frequencies and so can run into interference problems. But if an office building isn&#39;t using other equipment that might interfere, and if it isn&#39;t near other businesses using a similar system, converged Wi-Fi and cellular services should work well, Mathias said. Still, Strata8&#39;s offering is a clever idea that could work well for some enterprises, he said.The base stations that Strata8 uses, called pico cells, are made by UTStarcom and use the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) mobile technology. Enterprises must pay for the pico cells; Strata8 said the price varies depending on the site.One pico cell could cover a 10,000-square-foot building, but all structures present different challenges, Wilson said. Some deployments might require additional repeaters to extend coverage. Strata8 will hang the equipment for customers or train IT managers to do it themselves.Strata8 is in final negotiations on a roaming deal with a cellular operator, but Wilson said he couldn&#39;t reveal which one. Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel have nationwide CDMA networks.For now, end-users can choose from just five phones that work with the Strata8 system, including the Moto Q, Treo 700wx, Razr V3 and two HTC handsets. While any CDMA phone will work in theory, these selected phones support roaming between the Strata8 and the wide area cellular network.Other companies such as RadioFrame, also from the Seattle area, sell pico cells that help improve cellular coverage for enterprises. However, Strata8 has advantages because its system connects to an existing corporate telephone system, reducing the costs of calls for enterprises, according to Wilson. In addition, because Strata8 is using its own spectrum, it was able to set the flat rate monthly fee, he said.Strata8&#39;s service is available in some cities on the U.S. Virgin Islands and regions of nine states including Florida, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Texas, Virginia, and Washington. The company said it has a few customers already but declined to reveal their names.
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(InfoWorld) - On Monday evening, my wife reached me on my mobile phone. She was spending a long weekend with her family in Maine. "I've called our home phone several times," she said. "And I keep getting a busy signal." That night, I didn't think twice about the phone problem. We have been VoIP customers for more than a year, and flaky service has been standard operating procedure. I reset my VoIP converter box and crossed my fingers. Then, on Tuesday, when the problems persisted, I called my VoIP provider, SunRocket, and got the message that the company was no longer taking tech support and sales calls. That's not good. Many free-market analysts and large telecom providers have hailed this as a new era of competition. It's a wonderful new world where your VoIP provider can cut off your home phone service without warning. This week, SunRocket went belly up without any communication to its 200,000 customers. SunRocket had been providing both my home and my home office phone service. I could charitably say that phone service since Monday evening has been intermittent. In reality, phone service has been mostly dead with occasional spurts of dial tone. Now, when business associates try to call my home office, they get either a busy signal, or they get one ring and a hang-up. I'm trying to switch my home and office numbers to Vonage, but they say it could take up to 10 days for the switch to happen. When I first heard about SunRocket more than a year ago, it seemed like a good solution to large monthly telephone bills. The local incumbent phone service was charging about $60 a month for unlimited local and long distance. SunRocket offered unlimited local andÂ long distance and even some international calling for $199 a year. The company also offered a second out-of-area-code phone number at no cost. That feature caught my eye because my home office is in suburban Maryland, but most of the people who call me are located in Washington, D.C. My wife and I looked at a savings of more than $500 a year and decided it was time to check out VoIP. The switch was not without problems. Voice quality was spotty at best, particularly when we were talking to someone on a mobile phone. For months, we had problems with frequently dropped calls. We soon became quite familiar with the "not-my-fault" phenomenon. SunRocket blamed the problems on Comcast, our broadband provider. Comcast, of course, blamed SunRocket. (Comcast: We can't guarantee quality of service for third-party applications. By the way, why don't you switch to our voice over IP service -- it only costs double what you're paying now.) After months of experimenting with equipment configuration, we finally got most of the problems ironed out. When it came time to renew our annual subscription, we had mixed feelings, but SunRocket was still significantly cheaper that most alternatives. We paid $199 for a year of service in March. In late June, in a sign of things to come, SunRocket laid off about a quarter of its workforce. The way I look at it, someone owes us about nine months of phone service, but we're not holding our breath. Now, in some ways, this is just a story about a couple hundred thousand VoIP customers who saw their phone service go dead without warning. But there's a larger context here. During the last couple of years, some telecom analysts, free-market think tanks, and telecom carriers have trumpeted a new era of competition. Their argument: Old, monopoly-style regulations aren't needed any more because there's all kinds of competition out there. They say that telecom carriers shouldn't have to share their networks with competitors and broadband providers shouldn't be prohibited from blocking or slowing Web content from competitors because there's all kinds of competition out there. Meanwhile, SunRocket, the second largest independent VoIP provider, has shut down. Vonage, the largest independent VoIP provider, has faced a patent infringement lawsuit from giant competitor Verizon, and its future is uncertain. Verizon contends it owns the patent to the technology that translates VoIP calls and allows them to connect to traditional telephone networks. Wireless phone carriers provide some competition, but the largest two wireless carriers are owned by the two giant telecom carriers. I'm not sure that counts as competition. In the broadband space, there are some indications that one or two new competitors are on the way, but it could take years. Right now, well over 90 percent of the U.S. has at most two broadband providers, the cable company or the telecom carrier. The telecom carriers are fighting against auction rules that would encourage a new broadband provider when a chunk of television spectrum is freed up in early 2009. Elsewhere, broadband customers in other countries, such as Japan and South Korea, pay less for faster service. Japanese customers pay about one-seventh what U.S. customers do per megabit of bandwidth. But few people in D.C. want to talk about the real reasons for this. It's not free-market competition; instead, telecom services in many other countries are highly regulated and subsidized by the government. For some of us, the promise of telecom competition seems a long way off. And, by the way, if you want to find me during the next week, your best bet is probably e-mail.
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A new service promises cheaper mobile calls by exploiting VOIP, but it's not going to be easy. The big carriers must be considered, plus customers will have to punch lots of extra numbers. By Rachel Metz.
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NEW YORK -- Skype is introducing a $30 annual subscription to make unlimited calls with the Internet-based telephone service to any regular or mobile phone number within the United States and Canada.
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In a move that could help small and medium-size businesses save money, telecom carrier XO Communications has rolled out a new pricing model for VoIP.
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AT&T Inc , the biggest U.S.  mobile service, said on Tuesday it would offer unlimited mobile  phone calls for a flat rate of $99.99 a month, hours after  Verizon Wireless announced a similar plan.
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Net phones--and their portable phone numbers--help business avoid RNC crowds.