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Yahoo! Businesses The Internet Communications IT

Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng 118

Posted by CowboyNeal from the me-too dept.
Anders Bylund writes "Yahoo! is throwing their hat in the ring, adding Voice over IP features to the upcoming Yahoo Messenger release. With way too many players on the field, there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?"
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Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng More

Yahoo! Joins VoIP Throng

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  • Too many players? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bwd ( 936324 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:43PM (#14216373) Homepage
    The more, the better. The IM/VOIP market is one of the few markets where we have true competition. If Yahoo! is going to make a better app with VOIP than what I currently use (Google Talk), then I'll switch.

    • Re:Too many players? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oops, I read the headline as Yahoo joins a thong.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Messenger has had PC to PC calling for quite some time already. In their most recent release of Messenger they introduced a voicemail system that is actually rather cool. They have had webcam functionality for a really long time but the voice/webcam integration could be better (as best I can tell you have to start a webcam session AND a separate voice call to do web conferencing).

        In the UK, Yahoo messenger has had PC to phone calling for some time. You just had to link it to a BT (Brit' Telecom) account. H
    • Yeah!

      there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?

      Not when the companies you get your (paid for) phone service from also provide the internet access that lets you run these VoIP programs that compete with them over their own networks.

      It'll be a shakeout, but more along the lines of "them" lobbying for what you can and cannot do with your internet connection. And they will make it illegal for you to run peer to peer wireless networks in your own neighborhoods and cities, most likely citing a "thre
    • Way true. I'll be waiting on the sidelines to see which ones work with 3rd party apps like Trillian. I need to talk to people on all sorts of IM networks, but I refuse to use their standalone tools and have 5 different ones running simultaneously. They need to get their act together and work on a unifying standard like they talked about so long ago.

  • Skype ftw (Score:5, Informative)

    by AIX-Hood ( 682681 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:45PM (#14216385)
    Been using Skype for a while now and it still beats everyone else for 2 simple reasons: All advanced features work through a firewall with zero configuration, and it's fully encrypted. Yahoo, MSN, etc, talk to us again when you can boast these 2 features.

    • Re:Skype ftw (Score:3, Informative)

      by sapgau ( 413511 ) *
      Yes but, some of us need to make calls to the public telephone lines sometimes. What are skype's rates for that?

      • Re:Skype ftw (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by nacturation ( 646836 )
        Ever heard of Google? [google.com]
         
      • funny you should ask: skypes rates for calls to land lines and cell phones are $.02/min. That's not just to north america, but most of europe, australia, and a few other places as well. Not only is it cheap, but the sound quality is better than phone lines. (way better than cell phones)

        (not to be a skype fanboy, but he/she asked, and I'm just giving an answer)
        • Not only is it cheap, but the sound quality is better than phone lines. (way better than cell phones)

          I would disagree. Calling my parents using SkypeOut is horrible. I love the price, but the quality is down the toilet. Lag is a huge issue and I'm on a high-speed connection. I pay the 10 cents a minute and use my cell phone instead. It could be the area they're in has a lousy PSTN interface, but it's certainly not anywhere near cell phone quality for me.
           
          • I agree, sound quality using SkypeOut for me has generally been somewhere between "passable" to "downright horrible with skipping and massive lag". It certainly isn't any better than mobile phone quality.

    • Re:Skype ftw (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cryfreedomlove ( 929828 )
      How does the 'fully encrypted' part of skype work? Is it personalized encryption via public key, private key? Or does skype act as the man in the middle somehow?

      I suspect that issue will cause a call for government regulation to ensure wiretapping. In fact, I'll bet that this is a large factor in causing China to try blocking voip. [tmcnet.com]
      • No, it's peer to peer system using public/private key pairs. You only use a central server when identifying yourself to the network at logon.

    • Re:Skype ftw (Score:2, Interesting)

      by bookemdano63 ( 261600 )
      I think the fact that it works through a firewall is a drawback, at least from the IT perspective. Corporate IT departments hate Skype's security holes http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1891306,00.as p [eweek.com] and companies are going to block ithttp://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1877000,00. asp [eweek.com].

    • Re:Skype ftw (Score:3, Informative)

      by fufinache ( 787019 )

      Been using Skype for a while now and it still beats everyone else for 2 simple reasons

      It'll also beat the life out of your hard drive:

      "Unlike other applications, Skype polls the hard disk several times per minute. This can be verified either by observing the HDD led or by using a file access monitor such as Filemon. Although those accesses are small, extremely fast and safe in the short term, they can be extremely harmful in the long term. In particular the continuous access pattern does not allow the

    • openwengo does just that (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      and it does video and sms and offers you 3euro on sign on http://openwengo.com/ [openwengo.com]

      get it from here:
      http://www.wengofiles.teaser-hosting.com/wengophon e/rc/WengoSetup-0.99rc4.exe [teaser-hosting.com]

      oh yeah and it's GPL.
    • > Yahoo, MSN, etc, talk to us again when you can boast these 2 features.

      MSN Messenger 7.5 (subjective opinion to be sure) actually has better PC-to-PC voice clarity than Skype 1.4 _and_ works through every home network and most office networks I've used. Of course with Skype you still have the advantage of being able to call PC-to-Phone.

  • I don't want to be at my PC to make calls (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ReformedExCon ( 897248 ) <reformed.excon@gmail.com> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:45PM (#14216386)
    When calling overseas, it would be nice to forego the international rates in favor of much lower data packet rates on my cellphone. If there was a service that ran on my cellular phone that used VoIP data packets at a reasonable cost, that would be a huge step forward.

    Sitting in front of my PC with a headset is not convenient.
  • With way too many players on the field, there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?

    I don't think so. It will most likely turn out just like email, with thousands of providers that can connect to each other. In my opinion, this is a VoIP should be a service that should be handed out by the ISP's directly (pipe dream, I know)

    • Re:Not really (Score:3, Interesting)

      by castoridae ( 453809 )
      There has to be a common infrastructure; in this case the different IM backbones need to be connected, addressing needs to be tackled (I have the same alias on AIM and Yahoo, e.g.). For this to happen, a lot of the leaders are going to have to cooperate and conform to an open standard & directory. This isn't going to happen as long as they still harbor ideas of become the IM standard.

      And the issue of VOIP is similar. Often it's tied to the IM systems - this is about Yahoo Messenger - (which is why I br

      • Re:Not really (Score:3, Informative)

        by timeOday ( 582209 )

        There has to be a common infrastructure; in this case the different IM backbones need to be connected, addressing needs to be tackled (I have the same alias on AIM and Yahoo, e.g.). For this to happen, a lot of the leaders are going to have to cooperate and conform to an open standard & directory.

        Surely that would be SIP [wikipedia.org].

        But even there, things can go wrong. Vonage locks down their users' SIP boxes so they cannot receive direct VOIP calls, only over the Vonage POTS bridge. Bummer.

        Sometimes I won

    • The shakeout might eventually be of phone companies.
    • Just like we have at least 5 totally indepdendent (and mostly disconnected) IM-networks for years already. We never had a shake-out in that field, so why should there be one for VoIP?

  • VoIP Thong (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Did anyone else read that as "VoIP Thong"?

  • Free VoIP? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ech00ne ( 937418 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:51PM (#14216410)
    I wonder if this is a step towards making VoIP basically a free tool, much like the web is today. It would be interesting if Yahoo or another VoIP provider go to an advertising model to support free VoIP.

    I think it would be interesting to have ads while a call is being connected (i.e. ringing). It seems like they could pipe audio ads down the wire during the inevitable pause while the system tries to track down a cell phone, or the long distance call is being routed...

    A company like Yahoo could also put a phone front end on to the search engine, I'm thinking along the lines of directory assistance, but instead of limiting info to just addresses / phones numbers, the Yahoo directory assistance would search the internet and speak the results (and a few related ads) over the phone.

    They might even have the CPU power to do adequate speech recognotion. All told it is pretty easy to imagine a system taking adavtage of the newest phones, with enhanced SMS, web interfaces, along with a voice interface. It would also be cool if you could specify where you want your search result output to go. Maybe if they had VoIP and some type of phone based interafce you could have your results displayed on your phone, pda or spoken. With a viable VoIP perhaps you could have the results faxed to you at a hotel. I'd also like to see the option of having the results emailed.

    All told these relatively small technical advancements, would be large strides in making Yahoo even more ubiqutious. Non-computer users and casual users would have another resource to get and retrieve information in the "real-world".

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Dur... doop do dupe do do doo doooooooooooo shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

        I...otaly....eme.ber...hose...d.ys... Ca..you he.r.....now?... I can...hear... wait....now I cant.........give.....a.call..so...troubleshoot this..

  • Shake down? SBC would like that (Score:4, Interesting)

    by grasshoppa ( 657393 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:54PM (#14216419) Homepage
    Folks, this is getting interesting. VOIP is starting to explode. With projects like skype and asterisk, along side with the chat clients building it in, the phone companies ( well, ok, SBC/Ma bell ) are starting to get jittery.

    For example: I recently placed an order for a p2p ds3 from sbc. The "market executive" went out of his way to make sure that the line was more than suitable for everything I'd need. Not two minutes later, he said it isn't recommended for voip applications.

    Mark my words: We are going to start seeing legislation barring voip in any meaningful way.

  • Text only? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Turning Messenger into a multi talented communications hub looks like a smart move, because Yahoo! can't afford to let the others carve up the potential customer base with the Yahooligans left poking at their text-only IM.

    Um, why are they saying Yahoo Messenger was text-only? It's had video and PC-PC calls for some time. What's new is the voice out to regular phones.

  • yahoo! messenger! has! had! VoIP! for! 4! years! (Score:4, Informative)

    by iamstan ( 110049 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:55PM (#14216425)
    It even had the pc-to-phone feature back in 2001. So what is the news here? A press release advertising old features?

    http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,55259,00.asp [pcmag.com]

  • Interoperability (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ztransform ( 929641 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @10:56PM (#14216431)
    The concern I have with VoIP going forward is interoperability. This is on two levels:
          1. voice data transfer, and
          2. signalling transfer

    Essentially the world telcos today send voice around the world at 64Kbps (or a slightly lower rate for the robbed-bit signalling format used by some Northern American telcos). They can encode their data in two companded formats: A-law and mu-law.

    VoIP, on the other hand, can be transferred in a number of different codecs including G.703, G.711, etc.

    When sending VoIP over the internet the biggest problem is having to use two identical clients that speak the same data transfer encoding. But getting agreed standards on codecs to use is simple compared to agreeing on signalling formats!

    Let's use a call from Australia to the UK for example. Say that a telco in Australia sends a call from Australia to the USA on one fibre hop. Then a provider in the USA switches the call to the UK over another fibre hop. Will the data that I sent, compressed in codec A, be uncompressed at the US provider and re-encoded before sending to the UK?

    What if I need to make a call that traverses 3 or 4 providers! Compressing and uncompressing using lossy codecs equals a lot of noise introduced into the signal.

    Now, what if I want to make a VoIP call initiated by Yahoo! or Google or MSN or Skype or some other client desktop.. (dare I say Cisco or Nortel or Lucent or Alcatel?). If I want that call to, at another stage, enter another network there are so many compatibility problems to be sorted out.

    *pulls out hair*
  • I'd use it if it supports SIP and a wider range of voice codecs, especially those that are low bitrate and error resilient (e.g. G.729).
    • Yeah, I won't use any of those crap products aslong as they don't speak SIP. Sure skype works behind a router and so on, but it's still not open and I have to have their clients and everyone can't talk to everyone. Sucks. Big time.

      Kphone, gnomemeeting-opal, sjphone, x-lite, asterisk are the tools :D
  • I just hope, in all the hubbub, that standardization rises from the noise. But, *sigh*, there is already division and I'm sure the fractures will expand.

  • VoIP? Telephony? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by julioody ( 867484 )
    It would be useful to mention that by saying "VoIP" it means that voice transmission capabilities will be added to it, and not that it will interoperate with current VoIP telephony standards such as SIP, which by the way, Google Talk has plans to add [google.com] in a future release.

    The article mentions Vonage and SIPPhone alongside as "competitors", which gives people the idea that somehow they will be able to use it to make calls.

  • Why should there be a shakeout? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ltwally ( 313043 ) on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:06PM (#14216471) Homepage Journal
    "With way too many players on the field, there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?"
    Not necessarily. How many E-Mail services, Web Hosting services, DNS Registrars, and IM protocols and clients are there? How many telephone companies are there in the U.S., currently?

    Diversity and competition do not always lead to a "shakeout." With any luck, however, it will lead to a better situation than exists with the current (stagnant) telephone service.
    • Until the major carriers start doing QOS for their own voip services and inadvertantly degrade the others.
    • If they don't start working on interoperability I think there will be a shakeout. All the services you note as counter examples allow you to work with other services, but if I use Skype I can't call a SIP user or someone on Google Talk. Until I found Adium I had to have MSN, Yahoo and AOL Messenger all running at the same time (and even then I can't use my iSight) which, at best, is a pain. I've not used VoIP much but the same problem is apparent.

  • IAX2 (Score:1)

    by larsl ( 30423 )
    If it doesn't do IAX, then who cares? Are there really people that keep five different VOIP client windows idling at all times to handle inbound from all of the different services?
  • Throng, thra throng throng throng. . . . . .

  • Big deal (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jambarama ( 784670 ) <jambarama@gmaCOUGARil.com minus cat> on Thursday December 08, 2005 @11:29PM (#14216584) Homepage Journal
    there's bound to be some kind of shakeout coming, right?

    No. Has there been a shakedown of IM clients? No the only thing that seems to be a long time coming is a voip gaim equivalent. A cross-platform cross-protocol client. When someone steps up with a voip client that can talk to yahoo and google talk and vonage and whatever else, then we'll have something newsworthy.


  • in addition to all the IM communities adding voice, now that the gazillions eBay paid for skype has validated (i guess) software-based VOIP, there's this whole rash of stuff coming out now to send asynchronous voice messages over the Cloud (podomatic, waxmail, slawesome, V4S, the feature in MSN Messenger, et cetera ad nauseum)

    of all of the non-network ones so far the one that seems coolest is V4S http://www.orb.com/skype [orb.com] because of the way it makes email and skype contacts remotely available to me throu
  • If all these VOIP players start taking a serious chunk of change against the traditional ma-bell companies then it starts to make a difference. Wonder, what SBC think of their Yahoo partnership now. ;-)
  • When are some manufactures like Dell, IBM, etc. offering a voice IP activated order / support / whatever services from a web site, click this and you will be connected? Might even bring the english speaking connections back! Of course, I already patented this business idea so I will get $0.10 each call - cheap !
  • Yahoo follows.

    My personal experience with either doing business with them or comparing their products has shown me time and again how they turn someone elses' practical use of technology into a bumbled mess. For a profit.
  • There are really two seperate VOIP markets out there right now. The one that is mentioned here is the software version that goes through the computer of the user. Software based VOIP has been around for a long time now, but is limited in many ways.

    VOIP also has the "phone line replacement" type, such as Vonage, Optimum Voice(Cablevision's VOIP service), and others that let you use the service using a regular telephone that is plugged into a cable modem, router, or telephone adapter which makes your curren
    • Great post. This is the key. I have Lingo (which SUX btw), but at least I do nto have to sit in front of my PC to make/receive calls. If someone made an adaptor that would use a modem port to talk to the phone and basically function as a VoIP PBX they would be king.

  • I have been a user of Yahoo! from the beginning and I am apalled on the lack of upgrades to their Messenger for OS X. They haven't kept parity with the PC users and I think this is absolutely stupid of them especially with the resources they have. Also, their current email is soooo slow. Takes minutes it seems to go to the next message or delete and next, etc.,

    I have sinced switched a lot of my IM to skype as it works great on my Mac. Additionally I am now weaning myself from their mail app as I am sure the

  • Think about it. The person who supports more OSs then MS, gets the tech croud. The tech croud is the one telling the not-so-technical people what to use. The "shakeout" will come as soon as someone releases a good cross platform client. Simple as that.
  • There are fully functional Skype and Gizmo clients on Mac in addition to many other solutions available for voice chat.

    Yahoo messenger for OS X is a JOKE. It should never have "yahoo" name on it! If you don't know what I speak about, check its versiontracker page and read comments:
    http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 14474 [versiontracker.com]

    One of the funniest things about it is... It has quicktime supported cam functionality WITHOUT voice. I know one guy "video chats" running Skype and Yahoo videocam same time.
  • I have been using Y! messenger, with full SIP support (and a tie-in with the BT fixed-line service in the uk) for over a year now....

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