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Filed under: VoIP

NetZero will soon pull plug on voice calling service

My NetZero
NetZero, the one-time free ISP, which, in recent years has elevated itself to a discount dial-up provider, added voice service to its offering a few years go. This enabled its customers to make and receive phone calls over VoIP in much the same way Vonage and Packet8 provide such service.

Apparently, as Vonage discovered, it's not as easy as it looks on paper to make money competing with the local Bell. So hard in fact, that NetZero is canning their voice offering after many months of unsuccessfully trying to sell off their customer base to a competing interest. This is a harbinger of things to come in the fixed-location voice business, as even telco monster AT&T is losing wireline customers like crazy to cable companies and on account of people who have settled on a mobile phone as their "one solution".

So what's a NetZero customer to do? Well, there's always Vonage, if you must have a traditional phone in your home. But here at DownloadSquad, we prefer software-driven solutions like Gizmo Project, because it follows you wherever you go--on your laptop and on your cell phone.

Filed under: Internet, Blogging

When ISPs attack - with advertising

NebuAdOver the weekend there's been a pretty big flap over whether some A-list bloggers have violated the public's trust by participating in an advertising campaign. For the most part, nobody's claiming those bloggers has actually been bought off, but there is a question of whether bloggers should be interacting directly with their advertisers or maintaining the same type of wall between editorial and advertising content that mainstream journalists have.
Wherever you fall on the issue, it's kind of amusing to see that TechCrunch, one of the blogs caught up in the kerfuffle (and a quality unbiased source of Web 2.0 news), is reporting on another questionable advertising practice: ISP placed banner ads.

Apparently Texas based ISP Redmoon has rolled out software that places banner ads on pretty much every web page its customers visit. At first, it looks like there's a major new advertiser sponsoring every site on the web. But it turns out that it's just Redmoon making a buck off of other people's content.

It's one thing if you're a company offering free internet service supported by advertising. But Redmoon is already charging customers for internet access. It looks like this may just be the tip of the iceberg. Redmoon is using technology provided by NebuAd to place the ads, which refers to ISP advertising as an "untapped revenue source."

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