As if the battle for VoIP supremacy wasn't heated enough, with heavyweights like Skype Technologies SA, Vonage Holdings Corp. and now MCI Inc. slugging it out, you can now add cellular VoIP to the fight card. According to an article from CNET News.com, Mint Telecom has just launched a $7-per-month cell-phone VoIP service.
CNET asks an interesting question, why would cell phone users pay an additional $7 per month, plus a per-minute fee, for Mint's service, when they already pay a monthly fee for cell-phone service. Mint's founder, Jason Jepson provides some logic, "You could ask the same question for VoIP in general," he wrote in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "It's $24.95 for unlimited calling, plus $20 to $40 a month for broadband just to save a few cents?"
Unfortunately, his logic doesn't really hold water. I can use myself as an example here, Verizon's unlimited calling plan, with DSL, comes to about $110 per month (after you factor in the charges and surcharges and taxes etc.) If I were to stay with Verizon for my DSL service, but drop their phone service, the cost from Verizon would be $34 per month, add $24.95 per month for Vonage's unlimited VoIP service and you've got a savings of about $50 per month, hardly "a few cents."
It's easy to see how VoIP can save customers money, however the savings are much harder to achieve using cell-phone VoIP. Following its founder's math, it seems as though Mint's services will only pay for customers who regularly exceed their cell-phone provider's allotted monthly minutes, and/or consistently make international calls with their cell phones. Nevertheless, both Vonage and Skype say they also have ambitions to develop software for cell-phone access. —Brian Ward
Go to MCI story from Reuters
Go to Mint story from CNET NEWS.com
Go to VoIP story from The Deal
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