Videotron tries soft sell

Canadian triple-play cableco Videotron has announced that it is launching a new ‘softphone’ VoIP service intended to compete with software-based broadband telephony competitors such as Skype, Vonage and Primus. The company’s new VoIP service gives high speed internet users the ability to make calls from their personal computer or laptop worldwide. The new service will be available to Videotron broadband customers by the end of October. Videotron had 503,000 cable telephony subscribers and 854,000 cable modem internet users at the end of June, all in Quebec.