Do you want AT&T as your residential long-distance carrier? Good, because they don’t want you either. It’s too expensive to compete with regional phone services, the company says, so it’s not gonna bother trying anymore.

The AP says the nation’s largest long-distance company will stop seeking new customers for its traditional consumer long-distance service, once the bedrock of the company known as Ma Bell.

Instead, AT&T will bet its future on providing telecom and data services to business, currently 75 percent of its revenue, and selling residential customers new technologies, such as phone service over the Internet.

The company will continue to serve its existing residential customers but will no longer pour roughly $1 billion a year into winning new ones, AT&T said as it reported sharply lower profits for the second quarter.

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iBasis, Inc. (OTCBB: IBAS), a leader in international long distance, VoIP, and prepaid calling cards, today announced that it has established an interconnection with Skype, the global Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Internet telephony company, to provide worldwide call termination services over its global VoIP network. iBasis will carry calls originating from Skype’s soon to be launched SkypeOut service that will enable users of Skype’s application to place phone calls to any phone in the world.

Skype’s Peer-to-Peer application is the fastest growing voice communications offering worldwide. The free software, which enables users to use their PCs to make free calls to other Skype users, has been downloaded more than 16 million times since its launch in August 2003. The SkypeOut application will allow users to prepay to place calls to regular landline and mobile phones worldwide.

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Abundance of service choices seen keeping prices in check

By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff

AT&T Corp.’s decision yesterday to pull back from the residential phone market won’t mean fewer choices for consumers -- or higher bills.

In fact, consumers are swimming in choices, with more on the immediate horizon. There are prepaid calling cards and unlimited long-distance plans that can be bought from traditional phone companies, mobile phone companies, and cable TV companies. There are wireless services that price in-network calls from anywhere as local calls. There are services that bundle phone, cable, and Internet plans. There are customers who have abandoned their land lines altogether in favor of cellphones only. And there is Internet-based phone service, called voice over Internet protocol, that is poised to further scramble the marketplace.

The abundance of choices, competitors, and new technologies will keep a lid on prices even as the company that invented telephone service stops marketing itself to people’s homes, analysts said. Indeed, the increasingly fragmented business has made it difficult for AT&T to operate profitably.

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Cards Show Fumo With American Flag

POSTED: 10:43 am EDT July 23, 2004

State Sen. Vincent Fumo is sending more than 40,000 voters free five-minute prepaid phone cards after he was given a resounding victory by primary election.

The Philadelphia Democrat’s office has been sending out the cards, with a picture of Fumo and a rippling American flag, and thank-you letters this week. The mailing cost the senator’s campaign fund more than $30,000.

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