AT&T CallVantage customers are getting an email warning that the telco is discontinuing its VoIP service this year. No surprise, since the company stopped selling the service to new customers in August 2008, but will AT&T come up with an alternative offering? Customers within AT&T's service footprint are being asked to contact AT&T for alternative voice service, be it legacy wireline (probably not going to happen, given the continued decline in that service) or U-Verse voice over AT&T DSL. Out of region customers are being told that they have alternatives available with other service providers. [+]

We left Voip Inc's affliate program a long time ago when we suspected that something just did not feel right. Apparently we were not the only ones. Three former VoIP Inc. executives are being targeted by the SEC for improper bookkeeping and lying to investors about the financial shape of the company. A complaint filed Monday in Miami federal court says that between November 2004 and May 2005, ex-VoIP inc. CFO and VP of Finance Osvaldo Pitters and GM Terrell Kuykendall recorded $1.4 million in fake revenue from the alleged sale of computer hardware and fees for management services. The inflated revenue raised the company's overall figures for 2004 by 43 percent. It is also alleged that VoIP Inc. CEO Steven Ivester knew the company was struggling and the company's actual revenues were "substantially less" than its projections, said the [+]

North American in-flight Internet provider Aircell says all three airlines operating its service have requested the blocking of VoIP. Another four airlines who have signed up with Aircell haven't announced their VoIP policies yet. Sitting down with the Boston Globe, AirCell chief executive Jack Blumenstein said American, Delta and Virgin America have asked his company to block VoIP calls. "People don't want to have people talking around them on their cellphones," said Bluemstein. "The nightmare of 20 people on the plane shouting, 'Can you hear me now,' all the way from Boston to LA . . . a lot of people have taken positions saying we don't want that. So we block it." Interestingly, Blumenstein revealed that AirCell also provides the ability for in-flight communications via VoIP for the cockpit crew and cabin crew for voice communications to an airline's operations [+]

This afternoon at eComm 2009, Skype will formally announce that it is making its in-house developed SILK wideband voice codec available royalty-free. Yes, free, for incorporation into any third-party application or device. By offering SILK broadly in a very "open way, royalty free" to any third party developer, Skype thinks it can "unlock one of the major obstacles in the migration from narrowband video," said Skype GM Jonathan Christensen. SILK is designed as an Internet-specific speech codec able to work with variable bit rates. At its highest "superwideband" rates, it samples at 24 kHz, providing 12 kHz effective voice. It's designed to be scalable from 6 Kbps to 40 Kbps with very low delay, low CPU and memory consumption, and it's designed to be "very robust" for jitter and packet loss. The codec is written in fixed-point ANSI C, so it can [+]

Phone number provider Voxbone has officially launched iNum, a global phone telephone number system, leveraging the ITU’s creation of the +883 country code and VoIP technology to provide local number access with international reach. Current use of the numbers is in “private beta,” says the company.

Voxbone has teamed up with a laundry list of VoIP players to utilize the new code, including service providers Iotum, Jajah, Mobivox, Gizmo5, Ribbit, Truphone, Rebtel, Voipbuster and Voipuser. Wholesale voice carriers Arbinet, Belgacom ICS, Level 3 Communications and Stealth’s Voice Peering Fabric are already routing +883 calls today.

Basically, the 883 country code works like any other international country codes, just as 44 refers to the United Kingdom and 1 to the United States. Voxbox provides iNum numbers for free to carriers and service providers. As the wholesaler, Voxbone will receive calls to these [+]