15 September 2005
Media giant Time Warner is set to enter the home telephone market, when AOL announces the launch of its new stand-alone Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service next week.
Industry publication Light Reading says that the new home telephone technology, which works over a PC broadband connection, will be harnessed for AOL's "AOL Internet Phone Service".
AOL was one of the first companies to offer a VoIP service, but until now VoIP has only been an add-on to its instant messaging and email services, for which users have to subscribe.
The new service is going to offer VoIP to everyone.
The Yankee Group broadband analyst Jonathan Doran told Light Reading: "I think it's the next logical step for them.
"AOL, like all broadband services, has to put up with services like Skype and Vonage going over their lines anyway, so they might as well compete against the service-independent VoIP products."
AOL's dialup and broadband subscriber base dropped from 24 million to 22 million last year.
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