Bits and Pieces

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Spread Broadband

Firefox-like marketing could take off with the launch of AT&T broadband phone. Product's VNC foundation allows it to exploit broadband's capability in a big way. Apart from voice transfer, check these add-ons:

A shared sketchpad | Messaging | Directories | Web-browsing | Video | Store & Share pictures | Basic games | Music

[basically, all that VNC could potentially provide]

Parallelly, Skype's co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström explains how they are different from Vonage [interview]:
"Vonage is much more similar to Verizon and AT&T than to us. With Vonage, you’re using a regular telephone, dialing a number, and its services have rates similar to the telecoms. What we are doing is taking advantage of the broadband Internet to provide basically unlimited free calls to anyone at a higher voice quality than they can with the phone lines"

+ Skypeout [under 2cents per min to Chennai] helps make calls from PC to landline.

+ Answering machine for Skype.

Update: Ranga has reviews based on his Vonage experience.

posted by pradeep | Permalink | (3)

3 Comments:

Thanks for linking me up. I have heard bad stories about Skype and while 2c/min sounds good, I think Ill wait a bit before I jump in.

The reason for Vonage being different from Skype also becomes my motivation to pick it up since I need a conventional phone unit to be usable but without the price. And for the record, Vonage use only costs one half as VErizon or any of the Bells.

By The Last Blogger, at 8:35 PM

I have used Skype and I liked it, for the voice quality. Sounded just as in conventional phones. What I hated was having to use microphones. With USB units like these, the difference between Vonage and Skype becomes marginal.

Those units costing $22, may not be all too attractive but have seen excellent ones for $90+

By pradeep, at 9:59 PM

Also wait until AT&T's broadband phone...let's see how that goes.

By pradeep, at 10:00 PM