Let's face it: news is slow around the Christmas holidays. And, of course, everyone does these long, massive "year in review" posts. Instead of doing one gigantic one, I am going to do a few smaller ones, using my blog posts as a guide for "what happened."

The initial idea is to do one post for each quarter, highlighting a couple of stories that happened that quarter and follow up on where that story is now, if it's changed. We'll start with 1st Quarter 2007 after the jump.


AllFreeCalls.net Launches: The idea behind AllFreeCalls.net was to take advantage of the asymmetric nature of calling charges within the United States in rural areas and use the proceeds to provide free calling. After that large telcos refused to pay the bills and sued, they changed how the service works, renamed the service yak4ever.com, and continued onward. Ultimately, the service was shut down in November because the telcos refused to pay the bills.

Skype tacks on a connect fee to PSTN calls: Skype added a per-call connect fee to any call it connected over the PSTN. The charge did not apply if you had the Skype Unlimited (for US/Canada) calling plan so long as the call was to the US and Canada. Now that Skype Pro launched in the US/Canada, they discontinued the Unlimited Calling plan, effectively raising the price from $30/year to $36/year for unlimited US/Canada calling. Yup, Skype's still raising the price alright.

Value-Adds Won't Save VoIP: This is more of an opinion piece on phoneboy.com than anything else, but it got a lot of traffic and is worth revisiting. The basic premise behind this post was that "features" offered by Voice over IP service providers aren't really all that interesting. What interests me more than anything is complete connectivity, as well as the ability to manage that connectivity. While I have other issues with their current approach, Jangl appears to be the farthest along for one simple reason: they support SMS. Maybe GrandCentral will soon now that they're a part of Google.

Skype wants Carterfone rules applied to US Telecom: What's funny about this story is that, at least if we believe the PR of AT&T and Verizon, we may get something like Carterfone rules without the government mandating it. I'm all for that, though I think it'd be nice to get the laws clarified to ensure that we don't take a step backward in this regard.

Vonage Loses Patent Lawsuit To Verizon: This was the beginning of a series of patent lawsuits that the beleaguered Vonage has endured. I wonder when they're simply going to fold or be bought? Then again, who in their right mind would want all that patent liability?

We're all on IP, but we're still not connecting: This particular post bemoans the state of affairs with VoIP providers and how they don't try and interconnect. This is still a problem, of course, and will be an ongoing problem for the foreseeable future. Open standards don't mean much if you don't use them to interconnect.