voice over internet protocol

Its been a strange week for the Internet calling business. On Monday, SunRocket, a smallish competitor to Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) leader Vonage, abruptly shut down operations, essentially announcing to its 200,000 customers, Uh, sorry. While the details of that mystery are still being teased out, a long-secretive venture called Ooma announced yesterday that it plans to offer a new device for Web-based phone calls this fall. The company hopes to compete with Vonage and Skype, and grab a share of what analysts predict to be a rapidly growing market for Internet phone calls. Ooma is grabbing attention because the company has big venture capital backers, and quite a few dollars behind it. But as this Business Week piece points out, their plan customers pay $399 for a phone, then get free calls within the U.S. for life probably wont sound all that sharp to veterans of the SunRocket debacle, who saw their provider abandon them without notice.—Gregory Mone

Forget AT&T and the like. The only phone company you need is Skype, which routes your calls over the Internet and, as of May 15, 2006, costs nothing for outgoing calls made by users in the U.S. and Canada. And now you can almost forget your cellphone provider too-with this new Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) gear, you can make calls using Skype (or Vonage, another VoIP provider) from just about anywhere.

They don´t even call it Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) anymore-it´s just broadband phone service. And although the dirt-cheap all-you-can-gab plans made possible by routing calls over the Internet are a financial no-brainer, a raft of new phones makes VoIP truly practical. Now broadband callers can choose models with the functionality we take for granted on land lines, like cordless handsets.

Dept.: Geek Guide

Tech: VoIP

Cost: Free to $40 per month