After last week’s launch of Communicator, a voice over IP service that offered calls that bafflingly cost the same as fixed-line calls, BT have announced another VoIP service for broadband users. This time, calls are cheaper.
Broadband Voice allows subscribers to make voice calls via a handset, but using their broadband line. Now you know what those two little splitters they sent you in the post are really for.
Calls are cheaper, but still of good quality. The price structure is like reasonably simple. Rental is UK£14 (€21) per month, and allows subscribers to make free calls to other Broadband Voice subscribers.
Daytime calls to UK numbers are UK£0.03 per minute, and international calls are considerably cheaper. Rather like Skype’s new service, you can ring any phone.
For an extra UK£6.50 (€9.78) a month, calls under an hour to UK landlines at evening and weekends are free.
Good to see that BT are finally passing some of the benefits to VoIP over to consumers, but to be honest the service could be a bit cheaper.
BT Broadband Voice
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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