The search engine has announced yesterday its acquisition of the DialPad Communications Inc, the company that has been releasing for six years now software solutions for making phone calls over the Internet, at considerable lower prices than those offered by classical telephony services.

Neither of the two companies involved has released any kind of information regarding the value of this deal. It looks like Yahoo! will be using the solutions created by DialPad in order to extend its offer of products and services in the Voice over Internet Protocol area.

The current VoIP services allow the users to initiate and receive calls even from a classical or mobile phone, which represents a major advantage and an important innovation with respect to the limited PC-to-PC-only communication solution from the dawn of VoIP technology.

Depending on the pricing package, DialPad will impose a fee of 1.7 cents per minute, with the possibility of making calls towards over 200 countries worldwide. Taking into account the fact that the company's services are also available through pre-paid cards, it is estimated that the total number of DialPad users is over 14 millions.

Yahoo!'s offer, based on the technology and experience purchased from DialPad, could be available in a few months' time. However, its intention to launch these services as soon as possible is quite obvious, seeing that this is Yahoo!'s second implementation of such services in less than one month. In May, Yahoo! presented a beta-version of the client which offers PC-to-PC audio calls.