06:19 PM, March 27th 2006 by Gabriela

As the VoIP services market constantly continues to expand, two other companies have decided to enter the competition - Lycos and Jajah have both officially launched today their voice over Internet Protocol applications.

Property of the Spanish telecommunications company Telefonica, Lycos is launching Lycos Phone, a banner-including Windows program that provides free phone calls to users who sign up for credit cards offers or to the DVD service offered by Netflix.

For this service, the company has signed an agreement with Axill Europe Ltd. in order to use its Globe7 application. The contract covers 3 year during which Axill has agreed to exclusively offer Globe7 to Lycos, and not to other companies such as Yahoo, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN and Time Warner Inc.'s America Online Inc.

Jajah, the second company to step forth in the VoIP industry, offers simplified calling services which work by actually turning voice calls into data packets just like simple e-mails, sending them over the Internet and then restoring them into sound, thus substantially reducing the costs involved.

The service basically consists of a website where users introduce their own phone number and the phone number they want to dial. The company then calls the desired number and when the user picks up, dials the initial user's number, establishing the connection when he answers.

No additional software is needed and the application works on most operating systems, not exclusively on Windows. A trial version for this was launched in February this year.