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Videotron’s VOIP trials

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Videotron’s VOIP trials:

« Videotron Ltee’s telecom division, the company has more than 1,000 customers
testing its Internet telephony service in Montreal. ‘The tests are very
conclusive (+++), and Videotron with Videotron Telecom are currently
poisitioned to become the first major telco to provide IP TEL over a high
speed internet network in Canada,’ a Videotron Telecom executive wrote in a
recent e-mail after AOL Canada received plenty of media attention about its
new TotalTalk telephony service.
Videotron may be getting close to its Internet telephony if a meeting today
with analysts in Toronto is any indication. Rogers has set its VOIP launch
date for July 1, 2005 while Shaw Communications will likely go live in the
first quarter of next year. »

A source article would have been nice though.

[Lifted verbatim from Mark Evans.]

Update: More from Mark. I suggest reading it with his article on a possible CRTC poilcy shift and VoIP perspectives in Canada.

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0

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Ars Technica reviews Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0. Although I’m a very happy Firefox user, I’m still sitting on the fence with regards to Thunderbird: email is a critical app for me and I’m running well with Entourage.

It certainly ain’t broke (until the DB dies on me again), and I’m not sure I want to fix it.

An email client is not like a browser where I can easily switch between Safari, Camino, Firefox or even OmniWeb and, surprisingly infrequently, Internet Explorer: my email universe is only partially in IMAP and I have quite a large offline storage archive. In comparison, my bookmark list is tiny (that function was mostly transferred over to my news reader) and just a bunch of useful links, or tentative reading list, that don’t need to be synched together; even the plugins are installed once for all browsers. Additionally, although I don’t use Entourage’s integration with Office much, I do use quite a few Applescripts, support for which seems to be absent from Thunderbird. Address book import is also an issue: Entourage has a rather rich set of fields and any import process would have to be checked by hand.

Conclusion: email clients are a segment where the switching friction is larger than for browsers.

It does look like an excellent piece of software though and I view switching as an inevitable event in the long term, along with the retirement of any POP-only account and throwaway Hotmail addresses.

[Thanks to Pseudo for the reminder]