Looks like AOL Canada has decided if you can't beat 'em, join 'em amid expectations it will lower prices of its TotalTalk VOIP plans this week. AOL is currently selling VOIP two packages: $44.95 a month for plenty of features and 1,000 minutes of LD in North America, and $34.95 for 60 minutes of LD. This compares with Primus, which offers unlimited North American LD for $29.95; Vonage Canada, which sells its unlimited North American LD plan for $39.95 and 500-minute LD plan for $34.95; and BabyTel, which unveiled an unlimited North American LD plan for $30 earlier this week. As much as service providers would love to sell VOIP on features, price still rules the day. At VON Canada, you could feel the growing sense of frustration among executives struggling to build new businesses while the economics continue to crumble. Maybe this is a battle of the fittest. When the dust clears, the survivors may be able to raise prices. But there is also a risk consumers will equate VOIP to cheap, and resist attempt to price it otherwise.

In the Internet world, Jeff Pulver is a man of many hats.
His mini-empire includes running conferences, an Internet telephony service with 500,000 subscribers, a popular blog, and Web sites selling telephony equipment and virtual phone numbers. Then there's his Internet radio station and ambitions to be a professional poker player.
The 42-year-old's jam-packed schedule takes him to Toronto this week for VON Canada, a three-day conference featuring keynote speakers such as Skype SA co-founder Niklas Zennstrom and companies displaying the newest Internet telephony products and services.
The VON conferences, which are also run in the U.S. and Europe, have ...   more »

SIPquest, which makes SIP-based Internet telephony software applications, has attracted US$6 million in private equity from Covington Capital and Skypoint Capital. The Ottawa-based company, whose customers include 3Com Inc., said the money will be used get its technology into customers looking for multimedia collaboration and mobility capabilities, as well as providing service to enterprise equipment vendors and service providers. SIPQuest received $3.5 million in first round of financing from Covington, Skypoint and Santa Monica, Ca.-based Venturelab. The company had revenue last year of more than US$1 million.

If you didn't get enough Skype news yesterday, Niklas Zennstrom said Skype Video will go into beta testing this summer and could be launched later this year. Skype is also focusing its growth on China through a partnership with Tom.com, and the U.S. Tom.com is already doing aggressive marketing - large billboards in Shanghai, for example, while Skype will try to seed other markets by letting people pay for premium services in their native currency rather than forcing them to use the Euro. Skype Journal, meanwhile, continues its path to be the external voice with more than 1 million hits a month. Not bad for a new entity that started as a personal blog.
I moderated a panel looking at Wi-Fi and Wi-Max. It was interesting to see several service providers in the audience, which suggests the market could be poised for growth. There was a lot of talk about multi-protocol phones and whether device makers would come out with something, for example, that could handle GSM and Wi-Fi. My session took place at the same time as a panel on how broadband service providers such as Comwave, Vonage and AOL Canada are moving into voice so I suspect a lot of people attended.