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December 14, 2005
PC based VoIP services marks end of telephone card business?
With major software and telecom companies globally merging their offerings to provide integrated Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, telephone card companies are having a hard time maintaining their margins.
The pioneer of PC based VoIP service, Skype has already taken signficant market share in Europe and doing the same in the US. According to a report on the Wall Street Journal published during October, Skype is adding 170,000 new subscribers every day to its 61 million-person user base, up from 150,000 a day until September.
With its latest software Skype 2.0, the company plans to bring VoIP based service mainstream. The new version provides better voice quality, integration with VoIP based standalone phones that directly connect to the Internet without a PC, and video conferencing/calling features.
Instant messenger providers such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN also are joining the bandwagon by integrating VoIP service to their respective instant messaging clients. Microsoft this week partnered with MCI to provide voice calling to regular phones.
Most of the PC based services provide unlimited free voice calling between PC-to-PC but a nominal fee for PC to regular phone lines.
Certainly the heavily regulated and taxed PSTN telephone networks are at a disadvantage to this onslought of IP based voice services.
In the past one had to purchase telephone card to channel calls via the Internet to lower costs and avoid associated taxes. Now services such as Skype, MSN, AOL and Yahoo are gradually removing the need to carry a phone card around.
Posted by admin at December 14, 2005 02:20 PM