Starting yesterday, Gmail users can call any phone right from Gmail. The new service is integrated into the web-based email client and enables to call anywhere in the US and Canada for free and get low rates for other countries.
According to Gmail Blog, calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. “We worked hard to make these rates really cheap, with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute,” said Robin Schriebman, Software Enginee at Google.
Dialing a phone number works just like a normal phone. Just click “Call phone” at the top of your chat list and dial a number or enter a contact’s name. If you have a Google Voice phone number, calls made from Gmail will display this number as the outbound caller ID. And if you decide to, you can receive calls made to this number right inside Gmail.

“We’ve been testing this feature internally and have found it to be useful in a lot of situations, ranging from making a quick call to a restaurant to placing a call when you’re in an area with bad reception,” said Schriebman.
Google is rolling out this feature to U.S. based Gmail users over the next few days, so they will be ready to get started once “Call Phones” shows up in their chat list (they will need to install the voice and video plug-in if they haven’t already). But according to Schriebman, Google is working on making this available more broadly.

“Voice service is as mission-critical for businesses today as it’s ever been, and customers expect their VoIP service to perform as well as their traditional telephone service,” said Shawn Conroy, vice president, AT&T Business Solutions. 
According to Carlos Garcia, vice president of Silicon Labs, semiconductor solutions from Beceem and Silicon Labs will enable WiMAX gateway vendors to deliver products with the high performance, low cost, low power consumption and small size that their customers demand.
According to the recent report "The Future of Consumer VoIP" by
According to the report, the rapidly growing number of mobile smartphones creates opportunities to integrate voice interaction into a wide range of applications, as well as creating opportunities for other types of intelligent, converged appliances reinventing the home phone, for example. Amazon’s Kindle e-book shows the opportunity for mobile communications-equipped "appliances" at mass-market prices. 
Among the other features are: 

The company also said that Bria integrates seamlessly with other CounterPath desktop and convergence solutions, as well as with enterprise and carrier infrastructure equipment from major vendors such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, BroadSoft, Metaswitch, Avaya, Cisco and NEC. Bria iPhone Edition also supports Asterisk-based telephony systems.


There are over 100 service providers offering business VoIP services in
The analysts also found that providers with IP Centrex service offerings in multiple countries have an edge in terms of total subscribers or seats due to the size of their network footprints.