Telefonica Phone Cards Launched in the US

I recent saw that Blackstone, a leading prepaid distributor, is now selling phone cards here in the US from Telefonica who up until now have had little presence in the US market. There seems to be a trend lately with major telecom providers from other countries getting into the US market. Blackstone also sells cards from ETB, the major telecommunications provider from Colombia, and T-Mobile, owned by Dutch Telecom.

The trend is understandable as with the prepaid phone card market going bust a few years back left very few prepaid phone card providers to handle the demand. If a distributor wanted product, they had only a few choices for who to get them from (IDT, Ibasis, VCG, Radiant, At&T and a few other smaller providers).

The reality is that the prepaid phone card business is finally going main stream where only the big boys will be able to play. This is not a bad thing and will mean better quality and less games ultimately leading to a cleaner market.

AOL Launches Phoneline Service

Well the time has come... AOL officially launched their Phoneline service on Monday and are pushing the Free service along with free phone number. Cutely referred to as "Free Digits" they are pushing the free phone number as the main selling point to this service hoping to get a lot of takers. Coupled with the fact that it will work with the existing AIM messaging software it should be a relatively easy sell.

The real question is will they get new customers because of this or will it just be something that existing users will buy into? I know profit is not the motivation for offering this service since they are giving it away for free (they do have an up scale to an unlimited plan though).

From a user perspective I think this will be a nice service and they are doing a good job with the marketing side, but I really don't think it will change AOLs bottom line or paid subscriber base much.

AOL to Give out Free Phone Numbers - What Next??

I just read the other day that AOL plans to give out free phone numbers with it's AIM service. Just like all of the other dominant players like, MSN, Yahoo, Ebay and Google, AOL now offers free VoIP calls to other AIM users. It was developed to help enhance their product and gain back valuable market share which it has been steadily loosing over the last few quarters.

While I am not a big fan of this free phone call push that has been going on lately (it is definitely going to have an adverse effect on those of us in the "Paid" long distance business), I have to draw the line on AOL giving out free phone numbers. Skype offers phone numbers but charges for them and I would have to agree that there should be a minimal charge for the phone number as we the carriers have to pay a few bucks per month just to maintain the number. AOL has basically said that they will eat the cost of the phone numbers in order to try and gain back market share... While it serves their purposes (maybe) the rest of the telecom world is now faced with a dilemma! Give the stuff away at a loss or don't do business at all!

Is it wrong to want to make money in business?

Good luck to you AOL and I hope this desperate move ends up postponing your inevitable demise.