After SkypeFree, Wengo now goes free
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Oh man. That. Is. Fast. No longer than 3 days after Skype made its SkypeOut phone calls free for North American residents, that French softphone maker Wengo is announcing the same kind of offer.
Every call made from the PC to landline phones in 20 countries. The USA and Canada are parts of the list, but also France, Argentina, Germany, Spain, the UK or China!
There are three conditions, though. Only members subscribed to the Wengo Free before the end of June, 2006 could make those calls. Users are allowed to chat during 2 minutes per call, unless they buy the Wengo 10 euros pre-paid card. And registrations are restricted to one per IP, but that doesn’t imply you’ve to live in one of those 20 countries.
Wengo is a subsidiary company of Neuf Cegetel, one of the Big 4 telcos in France. Our regular readers know that recently Neuf Cegetel and Fon WiFi network inked a partnership to increase the use of VoIP on wireless networks and make more popular dual-mode phones (see Fon network to explode). And that Wengo released at the beginning of this year a Firefox extension under an open source license (see 10 Skype alternatives).
As Skype’s current attention is to make its way in America, its competitors are beefing up in Europe. With the Wengo-Neuf Cegetel going in the f*ing game, it seems the war of prices has just begun.
May 18, 2006 | By Nuno
11 comments
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Despues Skype, Wengo también ofrecerá llamadas gratis…
Wengo, el proveedor frances de telefonia ip, lanza tambien sus llamadas gratis a teléfonos convencionales dentro de 20 paises….
With wengo you can also chat with your msn friends or other systèmes : yahoo or jabber !
The video is included wengo works well on linux and is opensource and try to go in interoperabilité directions
And did you see it? Wengo claims to support any calls to any softphone now, mentionning their software speaks with MSN Live Messenger, Yahoo, AOL and Jabber. Wengo, don’t get me wrong, you ought to mention you cannot connect to Skype.
Yes, wengo can connect to the main IM software:msn,yahoo,icq,google.
That’s great, and now we can even call 26 countries for free, see www.wengo.com
Sean, would Skype be listed one day in the wengo’s compatible softphone?
Nuno, it’s interesting, but I don’t know yet.
Do you think it’s necessary?
What’s the benefit?
I hope we can have a chat sometime, my msn is seanjiang1983@hotmail.com, my email is seanjiang1983@yahoo.com
See you
Don’t think I love Skype that much. But as things keep going, there would be two reasons. First, Skype is becoming very popular in South-East Asia. And the consumer market over there will soon be bigger than North America and Europe combined.
Second, because Wengo is built on top of the OpenWengo project. And as many other open source projects, developpers like Duong Phan (this project thesis, in PDF) are trying to beef up the voice client with P2P technologies. If they can do it, Wengo network could expand a lot by binding nodes to Skype ones. This would improve a lot their voice client. But as it’s not working yet, and I wonder if Wengo have plans to go towards this orientation.
Nuno, in fact what i know is that wengo will be compatible with skype soon, they are already working in it.
Really? Are you sure of this?! Even if Skype isn’t willing to share its code nor its API?
Yes, I’m having internship in wengo now, we are really working on it.
I’m having internship in wengo now,