Saturday, July 24, 2004 - The Progress & Freedom Foundation Blog

The Week in VoIP

While the U.S. Senate turned Senator Sununu's VoIP bill from unregulatory to regulatory, see below, the regulation-free market forged ahead.

Verizon debuted VoiceWing, coming roughly a month after AT&T brought its VoIP product, CallVantage to market. Meanwhile, Skype appears to be headed to the public switched telephone network, hooking up with Level 3 for a new product, SkypeOut. For all things VoIP, of course, check out Pulver.

CNet reviews of most of these products are here.

Among the opportunities for this new market are the endless neologies invented by marketing departments: VoicePulse, Vonage, BroadVox, Packet 8, CallVantage, VoiceWing, OneFlex, VoiceGlo. Clearly "voice" or its latin antecendent "vox" have some resonance, while Vonage gets a twofer both having an acronym, "voice on net," and the latin overtones to its name. The pure VoIP plays, Free World Dialup and Skype still stand apart from the herd by not using the genius of marketing departments to name their products.

posted by Ray Gifford @ 3:34 PM | General