When I first read the announcement yesterday from Earthlink I was not so sure what they were up to, but Om has clarified their approach.
Basically, if a SIP provider is part of the “family” that Earthlink has joined up with (SipPhone, FWD) calls on net are free as part of being a subscriber. Greg at VoIPWeblog has some interesting points too.
It’s also important to read Jeff Pulver’s post on this offering as it presents some interesting insight about how touchy the relationship between FWD and Earthlink really is.
Oh. It uses X-Ten’s softphone. That guarantees it’s an FWD and SipPhone clone..
Um, the fact that EarthLink distributes X-Ten’s softphone doesn’t say anything with respect to “guarantees it’s an FWD and SipPhone clone..” You should know better.
X-Ten is a generic SIP client. It does not define the nature of the internal service beyond that it supports SIP (an open interoperable Internet standard). FWD, SipPhone, and EarthLink’s new VoIP service are all SIP, and therefore they can all use any SIP compatible client and interoperate with any other SIP compatible system.