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."

Cheap international calls!

Cheap domestic calls are easy to get these days. Vonage, Skype, Cell Phones, etc all make it easy to call anyone in the USA (or at least 48 continental states). Its internation calls that are still a bit expensive. Granted things have gotten better as most international calls can be made for less than $0.50/minute and some in the low $0.20/minute. I remember when a phone call could cost upwards of $3/minute! Ouch!

free as in beer & speech

Screw $0.02/minute, Ventrilo [ventrilo.com] is free and much less likely to be wiretapped!

Market?

Is there really any market for this? I know I definitely wouldn't want to be tied to my PC every time I wanted to make or receive a phone call.

Doggone it

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.

Who's Calling?

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.

It's always hackable

and *not* hackable!
It's always hackable [spoofcard.com]. Your grandma can hack caller id on a regular phone. Your standards are higher for the brand new technology?

Well, duh.

It won't charge to receive calls.

So I don't have to pay for the calls I can't receive anyway, since the first part tells me that the calls have to initiate from the PC?

Interesting alternative

While I commend Yahoo! for trying out a new service, this pricing scheme is just 50 minutes better than the basic package offered from Vonage (just as reference). If you look at the softphone offering from other vendors, I think that this Yahoo! service might be on par, if not slightly more/less expensive.

Good work Yahoo! ... good luck as well.

How many digits in the phone number of the future?

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?

Re:How many digits in the phone number of the futu

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.

Competition

It's nice to see further competition in the IP telephony area.

Skype is great, but it doesn't have the brand that Yahoo has. I can't imagine my mother downloading Skype, and calling overseas with it. But she's known about Yahoo messenger since the late 90's and has even chatted with distant friends. She would notice this functionality.

-- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/ [runfatboy.net]

Service evolution

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.

How doesn't this interfere

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.

Why bother?

Let's take a look a what Yahoo has to offer compared to Skype: Cheaper: No Handset available: No SkypeIn equilivent: Unknown, but the article doesn't allude to the possibility Obnoxious Yahoo Messenger advertising: Yes I guess it sounds good to Yahoo faithfuls who have been living in a cave and don't know about Skye, but why should I switch?

Don't they already have this?

I've been a Yahoo messenger user since 2000, and I distinctly remember being able to place PC-Phone calls using Yahoo Messenger since about 2002.

I quickly scanned through archive.org versions of older http://messenger.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com] features to see if I could find a page where they advertised this as a feature, but couldn't find it.

I certainly do see a "Call Center" to "Place Net2Phone call" on the current version of Windows Yahoo messenger 7.0 I have. So what's new with this? I didn't find this a groundbreaking feature of Google Talk either. Is Yahoo just relaunching this feature to counter Google's launch of Talk?

Spim at dinnertime?

>> ringgg > click

VOIP vs Traditional Landlines

Slightly off-topic..

I would like to save money by switching to VOIP but all the horror stories [voipreview.org] I hear from customers of Vonage, Sunrocket etc scare me.

Is this just a case of small but vocal minority or is VOIP still not ready for primetime? Any advice will be appreciated.

Open standard?

I sure hope this is an open standard. Personally I don't want to make and receive calls from my computer, but I'd certainly install an Asterisk plugin and make and receive calls on a normal phone.

But will it work with MSN/AIM/Skype?

Let me guess, this will be built on a proprietary standard and Yahoo users can only call other Yahoo users and landlines/cellphones. Why would they support open standards like asterisk, if they cannot even support jabber?

Cool ! Now improve the linux client and the video

I have the windows beta installed now and it looks like it just has the same old video. Skype as well as wigiwigi seem to be way ahead as far as video is concerned. It's going to be interesting to compare voice quality because yahoo now uses the global ip sound voice codec, which is what Skype uses.

Hopefully they add call forwarding too. With Skype I can get calls forwarded to my cel phone even when the computer if off.

The Y! linux client is a real bummer, it looks like they haven't done anything to it for years. The reason I started using windows again was because my Y! chat friends kept wanting to see me on a webcam.

I can even think of a whole [21publish.com] country [inq7.net] where the internet users would like to see a linux client as good as a windows client. After the raids last year many internet cafes in the Philippines took down their illegal copies of Windows and installed Linux. I heard alot of complaints for a while.

My favorite is actually wigiwigi, I use it whenever I can find someone computer literate enough to use it on the other end.

It's been available for awhile in Japan...

...from what I understand. It's part of a complete TV/internet/telephone "Yahoo BB" system. You can see an English page here [bbapply.com].

What about Emergency Calls (911, 000, etc.) ?

So, we read that VoIP providers have to insure that
they don't give users the "false security" of being
able to make Emergency Calls (since, in most cases,
a VoIP system won't send caller's location details)

Some ADSL modems have POTS-phone ports (for analog-
telephones and maybe FAXs) built-in, along with the
more common router features & ports - in Australia,
ISP Internode offers Agile's NodePhone VoIP service
using Billion 7402-VGP (has 2 phone ports that work
even when the computer is switched Off).

I'm told that this Billion VoIP-ready, Modem/Router
has a so-called "Lifeline" feature that just switch-
es Emergency Calls to the landline - bypassing VoIP
service & its ADSL connection.

QUESTION: Is it only Agile's NodePhone that can use
                    the "Lifeline" feature(s)?

                    Or, can Skype & other VoIP services do so
                    as well?

                    (I see the seeds of an Open Source S/W de-
                    velopment project here & maybe several..)

I look forward to this new service

I have used the Dialpad [dialpad.com] service for a long time for making PC-to-phone calls, even before Yahoo took over Dialpad. The sound quality is far superior to Skype. I need this kind of service because I don't have a regular land line and I make so few phone calls. So $10 worth of credit can last me up to 2 months, which means this type of service has a great advantage over Vonage as well. If you check out the information on Yahoo's site [yahoo.com] you will notice that indeed, once you have a phone number, people can call you if you have Messenger running, and if not then the calls go to voicemail which you can check for free. And the cost of the service is a little extra but not much.

I think you guys talk too much

For over 6 years now I have had Qwest service at 5c/min with
no montly fee.  The break even compared to yahoo is 100 mins
per month.  The next 100 minutes will cost me a whopping $3 more than yahoo and <i>I get to use a real phone with real quality of service. </i>.  Even at 600 mins its only 15 bucks more and I know I'll never ever get dropped or hear 'what did you say?'

I guess I'm old fashioned - I was out of college before cell phones and as IANAL I just find no need to bs on the phone all day long. 

Re:Numbers?

and how exactly are they going to handel gettign a phone number for every yahoo account.?? so that the landlines can call?

It's not every yahoo account, just the ones that opt to pay the $2.99 monthly fee.

Re:Numbers?

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.

Problems with Skype

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.