AT&T is planning a service that will allow customers to place calls via the Internet, which would make it the latest and largest telecommunications company to offer the option.

Calls placed using voIP are less expensive than those made over the old telephone system. AT&T expects the service to be available to consumers in the top 100 markets by the first quarter of 2004.

Read more: CNet News.

The reason they are doing this is the price war on long didtance. Several lond distance companies have unsustanable prices and will be raising them in the next year. Analog technology is slower and less cost effective and therefore switching it to digital and then back again should allow them to under cut and put out of buisness several of their major competitors who may not have this tech. If this happens i fully expect the prices to soar to Ma bell days.

Does anyone remember Dialpad from way back when? While it was free, a friend and I used it constantly for business as we were a long distance call away from each other. For free the quality wasn't that bad either, as long as we were both on a high speed connection. I wonder how this service compares?

Yes I used this quite frequently when my fiance and I were at different schools. It saved me a boatload of money on long distance. I think a big qualifying factor in this is that you need to be on a high speed connection to get it to work good, I tried calling my parents with their dialup connection and it wasn't up to par as if calling my fiance.

And I would almost thing this sort of thing would be the same way, that you would have to have a high speed connection to get the full benifits out of it. And there are quite a few people who still do not have high speed, simply because they don't want it, or it isn't available in their area.

Though high-speed connections are (sort of) coming down in price, they are still too pricey for many people. If this service sounds bad without it, that could definitly cause AT&T problems, particularly since unlike Dialpad in its youth, this service costs money.