Yahoo said today the company plans to allow computer users to make and receive calls from phones at rates that undercut eBay-owned rival Skype and are below those of traditional phone companies.
Yahoo said a new version of its Yahoo Messenger text, voice and video communications software to be introduced in the next few days will include "Phone Out", with low per-minute charges for calls from computers to phones, and "Phone In," a low-cost subscription service for phone callers to call computer users.
The world's largest Internet media company said it plans to charge one cent per minute to Yahoo Messenger users calling the United States from, say, Russia, or anywhere else in the world and 2 cents a minute to call 30 other countries including Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Korea.
In all, the Yahoo Messenger phone-calling service will be available in 180 countries, according to a spokeswoman for Yahoo.
Blair Levin, an analyst with Stifel Nicolaus, said in a report to investors that Yahoo's move is part of a broad and growing challenge to traditional telecommunications carriers.
While unlikely to lead consumers to replace traditional phone services on a broad scale, he said, computer-based phone services will put further pressure on phone company revenues, even as they raise regulatory issues about whether to begin requiring Internet services to meet costly phone regulations.