Yes, you read that right: "Verizon Communications will begin selling Internet telephony services to broadband customers early next year". But wait, what are they really offering? "[T]he company plans to begin offering unlimited dialing between broadband-enabled computers for a flat fee." Excuse me? Calling between broadband-enabled computers has been here for many months, through services like IPtel and FWD, and it is such a trivial service to provide that nobody charges a dime for it. And now Verizon thinks they can get people to pay for the privilege?

But maybe there's something to this beyond the SIP registration service. Perhaps they're planning to offer Quality-of-Service for VoIP calls on last-mile links? That would make this PC-to-PC service an interesting prelude to the PC-to-phone service that they're talking about offering later. At least until home router manufacturers start supporting VoIP with QoS in their devices, eliminating the incentive to pay Verizon a monthly fee for the same service.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out. I fully expected the Bells to attack VoIP through regulatory channels, which has already started, but I didn't expect them to enter the consumer VoIP arena quite so quickly.