Wengo VoIP Platform: Open Skype Alternative

Recently, developers from the company Wengo opened on the Internet exchange VoIP-services. Any VoIP-provider can go there and register a phone number with a connection fee (in the USA they are known as 1-900, in Russia - 8-809) or toll-free (1-800 in the USA or 8-800 in Russia). In the case of a paid number, Wengo takes a commission of 30%. This is about the same rate that operates in traditional telephone networks, where the commission is taken by the telecommunications company.

The Wengo Services Exchange is a great example of how the French company Wengo, which is called “an open alternative to Skype”, builds its business. Unlike Skype’s business model, the French are trying to create not a service, but a platform for VoIP telephony, and an open one, for which anyone can create third-party applications. As you know, the platform always wins the service.

The WengoPhone client program for voice, text and video chat is distributed along with the source code under the GPL license. Naturally, SIP is used for communications. The program is available in versions for Win, Linux and MacOS.

Unfortunately, in the two years of its existence, the WengoPhone program has never become truly popular. This is the main reason for too small subscriber base, writes O'Reilly Radar . But this shortcoming can be quite eliminated with the help of the second innovation, which was presented by the developers last week.
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Another service on the Wengo platform is an interactive WengoVisio flash widget . If you hang it on the site, visitors to the site will be able to make calls to Wengo, even if they do not have a client program installed. The widget owner is supposed to post it on his blog and customize it to his Wengo number, so visitors can call him with one click. Moreover, a personal widget can be launched via a direct URL from an email, for example.

Perhaps in the future, the WengoVisio widget will allow users to call even for commercial and toll-free numbers that are registered through the Wengo Services exchange. Then it will be a real breakthrough, since this service is very convenient for online stores and other B2C businesses.