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Lycos Set to Offer Free Internet Phone Service

Posted on: Monday, 3 April 2006, 18:00 CDT

By JAY FITZGERALD

Lycos Inc. is getting into Internet phone service - and it's giving it away for free.

Following up on a recent move by search-engine rival Yahoo, the Waltham-based Lycos plans to unveil today its own Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) product.

Unlike Yahoo's service, though, Lycos says it's providing everything, except international calls, for free, whether it's computer-to-computer phone service or computer to landline or mobile phones.

"It's completely free" on domestic calls, said Brian Kalinowski, chief operating officer of Lycos, now owned by South Korea's Daum Communications.

Though Yahoo unveiled its own VoIP plan earlier this month, Kalinowski said Lycos has actually been working on the project for a while.

"We're constantly asking ourselves, `What can we do now?' " said Kalinowski, noting that search engines such as Google and Yahooare constantly introducing new products and services.

But how can it make money if it's giving the product away for free?

By driving traffic to Lycos.com and via advertising dollars on the phone-service desktop application, he said.

A spokesman for Verizon, one of the nation's largest phone and Internet providers, said it has long been expecting more phone competition from rivals - and that's why Verizon has invested so much in laying new fiber-optic lines around the country.

"It's just another example of how competitive this telecommunications industry has become," said Cliff Lee, a Verizon spokesman.

But Lycos, which is still one of the more popular sites on the Web despite a big fall from its dot-com heights in the 1990s, is entering VoIP at a crucial time.

Large Internet providers, such as Verizon and Comcast, are increasingly talking about possibly one day charging site owners extra money based on their bandwidth use - a proposal that has infuriated Internet companies such as Google, a search engine, and Vonage, an Internet phone provider.

Source: Boston Herald

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