AT&T Goes after Skype and other cheap VoIP Players

I was surprised this announcement didn’t get more play in the blogosphere today.

My Take: AT&T announced today that they are willing to cannibalize their landline business to stop new players like Skype from killing their business for them.

Thats a pretty big declaration on their part that they see the threat of the new players and are willing to take them on in the pricing realm.

What AT&T really announced was that they will give their customers a “75 percent in discounts for international rates on phone calls carried out via its VoIP-based CallVantage Softphone Service.”

In other words: You use the landline – you pay 100%. You use their soft-client – from Counterpath – you pay 25%.

This is a clear attempt to be competitive with Skype and the other softphone based companies. It also clearly pushes their customers to use the online client to get cost savings. In some ways this may prompt them to try other vendors when in the past they had resisted. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.