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 [+]

SaskTel is terminating its WebCall VoIP service after five years. The company said that there were only 130 WebCall customers in Saskatchewan and 270 outside of the province. A spokesperson for SaskTel said WebCall had "limited marketing success" and had been operating "at a significant loss" as a result. WebCall customer were informed of the service termination in January and were told to find an alternative solution prior to March 1. Customers may have some headaches transferring their numbers, depending on where they live and who they transfer service to; doubly so if they have waited until the last minute to find another provider. SaskTel joins a number of larger phone companies that have pulled the plug on VoIP services, but given the small number of customers that were using its service, it is unlikely the company will be launching a new [+]