AOL: You've got VoIP

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pose potential complications for both sides.

"It creates an enormous amount of tension," said Matthew Harrigan, an equity analyst at Janco Partners. "The last thing cable companies want is to get disintermediated by a Vonage" type of service.

Time Warner Cable declined to comment for this article.

Look to Canada
Last December, AOL Canada launched "Total Talk" in the greater Toronto area, with a promised Canada-wide rollout by the end of the year. The service could be a glimpse of what's to come.

Total Talk bears a striking resemblance to most mainstream VoIP services. For one, it's available to anybody with a broadband connection, whether it came from AOL or not. This "bring your own broadband" model is typical of most commercial VoIP services nowadays.

AOL Canada sells two plans on Total Talk. The first is $16.11 ($19.95 Canadian) per month for the first three months, then $28.26 afterward. It includes unlimited local calls plus 60 minutes of talk time to anywhere in North America, then it's 4 cents per additional minute. Another plan costs $24.21 a month and includes 1,000 North American anytime minutes.

Free features include ringing calls through to three different locations and Voice Mail Plus, which lets people listen to their voice messages on a PC, forward or reply to them via e-mail, and archive them for future reference.

In the United States, AOL has sent beta testers installation kits that include an adapter the size of a CD Walkman that people plug their broadband connection into on one side and their phone cord on the other, according to message board postings by testers.

Standing room only
AOL has many advantages and possible speed bumps in becoming a VoIP player. Because operating costs are low, many companies big and small are squeezing into the VoIP market, including Vonage, Packet8, Covad Communications and AT&T, to name a few. Cable companies have either launched or plan to launch digital phone services on their networks, and some of the Baby Bell phone companies plan to package VoIP into their future upgrade plans.

To stand out from this clutter, AOL will use its powerful brand name and its wide reach on the Internet to grow the service.

"A player like AOL...does have an advantage because of its customer base and brand name," said Kate Griffin, an analyst at market researcher The Yankee Group. "There are a lot of me-too players building brands from scratch, and marketing costs could swamp a start-up."

AOL's VoIP plans could also spur similar offerings from Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN Web portal, although neither company has announced anything yet.

Like AOL, Yahoo and MSN already offer digital phone calling services through their instant messaging software, although those services haven't garnered the attention that the new breed of VoIP operators have gotten. Each service charges a few pennies a minute for calls to phones. But traffic and revenue is "minimal," according to a source at Net2Phone, which still supplies each IM maker with the technology for these calls.

[Dachi]

VoIP, a good reson to dump AOL and get broadband

Between offering video downloads on their home page and now offering VoIP that also cannot be used with dialup it seems that AOL is trying almost as hard to market themselves out of the dialup business as their competitors.

[Ubber geek]

trying almost as hard

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