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Futurephone.com is offering free long distance to a couple of dozen international destinations for people who already have free US long distance or a bucket of minutes they can utilize for US long distance. No VOIP adapters or softphones required. Instead, callers make a phone call to an IOWA phone number and are then provided with a dial-tone to dial internationally. Right now the company appears to be trying to build up its user base. Next year we may see them introduce commercial messages that are played before a call is put through.

Canada’s telecommunications regulator, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), reaffirmed an earlier decision to continue to regulate what the major telephone companies can charge for VOIP services - at least until the incumbent telephone companies lose 25% of their market share. In doing so, it ignored the government’s desire to allow free market forces to play a bigger role. From the Globe and Mail.

Since I last surveyed Canadian options for high speed wireless data:

- Rogers has raised the cap on its top EDGE plan (C$100) from 100 MB to 200 MB
- Bell and Telus have imposed caps (250 MB) on their EVDO 1x plans (C$100) which can be expected to provide better performance than currently available EDGE technology

Meanwhile, the US cellular carriers continue to offer uncapped high speed data plans at lower rates than their Canadian counterparts:

- T-mobile EDGE (US$49.99)
- Cingular EDGE (US$60 with voice plan, $80 without)
- Verizon EVDO 1x (US$60 with voice plan)

Since being bought out by Rogers, FIDO has posted rate increases for many of its services.

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As TechDirt again reminds us all, just because a carrier says their service is UNLIMITED in large letters doesn’t mean it isn’t subject to bandwidth and usage caps that can result in the service being cut off for unsuspecting users. Wireless Broadband services are not really a substitute for DSL.

According to the Business 2.0 Blog, the people who brought us Napster and Skype now want to bring us a peer-to-peer television service. While there are already a number of TV over-the-internet services already available, a P2P based service would save on the huge bandwidth costs.

Phil Zimmerman has finally released the Windows version of Zfone. As previously mentioned, ZFone sets up encrypted communications using the ZRTP protocol between two SIP software clients. The Windows version joins existing version already available for MAC and LINUX systems. While this software will be very handy for two individuals that wish to keep their VOIP communications private, in order to truly bring privacy to the predominantly insecure VOIP industry it is hoped that the protocol will be licensed by VOIP handset manufacturers and SIP telephony service providers.

Emblaze is offering its Emoze push email service at no charge, hoping to generate revenues by selling optional services at a future date. The service works with Outlook, Notes and certain Web-based services such as Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail. A wide variety of cell phones and other PDA-type devices are supported. The client device needs some sort of data connectivity which can include: broadband IP, wireless 3G (WCDMA/UMTS and CDMA2000), Wi-Fi 802.xx, Wi-Max, GPRS (2.5G), EDGE, CDMA 1xRTT or CDMA 1xEVDO.