Yahoo Offers Local Phone No. With VOIP Telephony For $2.99

Yahoo lanuched a service to provide local telephone number for $2.99 per month. The calls will have to be initiated from a PC, but can be made to traditional landline phones and cellphones.

Yahoo customers can receive calls from traditional landline phones and cellphones. 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.

Yahoo is undercutting Internet telephone leader Skype by about $1 monthly for such PC-to-phone service.

Yahoo and Skype both offer PC-to-PC calls for free, as do instant-messaging services including America Online’s AIM, Microsoft’s MSN Messenger and Google Talk.

You need a headset with microphone to make calls or a PC with a built-in microphone and speakers.

Two other players to enter this market are Microsoft and AOL. MSN is now testing a PC-to-phone service. AOL says it will have PC-to-phone calling available later this year.

Yahoo plans to differentiate by aggresive pricing and interoperability with Yahoo Messenger and the Yahoo network including e-mail, instant message, news headlines etc.

Source: USA Today