A new plan by the FCC to keep the Universal Service Fund stocked in anticipation of the coming August exemption for DSL providers will likely lead to higher VoIP bills for consumers. The agency has ruled that companies like Vonage and SunRocket who offer Internet telephony services must now pay 7% of their revenue into the fund -- used to subsidize rural and low-income phone service -- which has been traditionally been stocked by taxing POTS and DSL providers at a rate of 10.9%. However, since DSL providers have been let off the hook for this program, the FCC needed to make up for the shortfall, so the agency both instituted the VoIP component and raised cellular carriers' contribution from 3% to 4%. Since providers tend to pass new costs on to the consumer, we can probably expect to see higher VoIP bills in the near future, but luckily the recent repeal of that Spanish-American war-era excise tax should mostly balance things out on the cellphone side of things.

Fusion Telecommunications of Dubai has just entered the already crowded VoIP market with a beta version of its SIP-powered Efonica service. Registered users can chat amongst one another for free using standard telephones connected to an analog phone adapter or dial POTS lines on the cheap, with calls to the US from other countries costing under two cents a minute. What sets Efonica apart from some of the other services out there is its claimed ability to work even on dial-up connections -- still a rarity these days -- allowing people in areas with low broadband penetration to get in on all the fun offered by Internet telephony. Although the basic version of the service is free, calls to landlines or cellphones and voicemail functionality require signing up for the Efonica Plus option, which will avaiable at the end of the public beta test in about two months.

[Via Personal Tech Pipeline]

Dear Ma Bell,

We've been together for a long time, but we think it's time for us to take a break up. It's just... we met someone else; someone who will hook us up with free long distance. But don't worry, we'll give you a call sometime next year when we're looking for faster internet.

In today's How-To, we're taking the diagonal cutters to the Ma Bell umbilical cord and hooking up our voice over IP adapter so we can use our old phone jacks. No soldering irons or caustic acid required. This time.

If you're not too worried about being on the Fed's wiretap-this-VoIP-line list, Intel's making it a little easier to get your internet telephony on with their new 600SM PCI phone adapter. Not too different from the usual kind of POTS-to-VoIP gear you'd see from Vonage, et. al., but this one adapts that telephone through your computer, and is compatible out of box with your choice of CounterPath, DeltaThree, Engin, Packet8, Skype, and Yak. Not a bad idea, if you ask us, but we probably won't bite until it's motherboard integrated, We're just not all that terribly interested in a VoIP calling card, dig?

Qool's had a few arbitrary devices over the years, but we definitely had to look twice at their SkyQube and SkyQube². It's apparently still early on in development, but the box gives you calling every which way possible, often using Skype as a call conduit: USB to PC audio / Skype, Skype to POTS forwarding, Skype to (integrated) GSM forwarding, Skype to Skype, SkypeOut, Skype messaging to SMS, followme to/from Skype -- all of which you use with your POTS telephone. It's also got conference calling and integrated contacts, just one giant Skype love-in, supposedly to go for $80 for the SkyQube and $150 for the SkyQube². We're just not ready for that much Skype though, man, you know?