By PETER SVENSSON , 03.27.2006, 06:17 PM

NEW YORK: Users of Voice-over-Internet telephony (VoIP) yesterday saw two new options attracting them with unusual features.

 The first offering is linked with promotion schemes for credit cards and Netflix's DVD service and gives free calls to phones from 100 minutes onwards for people who sign up. Those who pass up these offers have to pay to call ? domestic calls within the US will cost them at the rate of 1 cent a minute. This Windows-based service was rolled out by the portal Lycos. Users will also be able to get movie previews and text messaging besides PC-to-PC calling. Lycos is owned by the Spanish telecom company Telefonica.

 The other service is a Jajah offering and aims to simplify VoIP. In it, a user has to go the Jajah site and provide both his own number and the number he wishes to call. The site then connects the two lines.

The user does not need a microphone; nor does he have to install any special software as the call is connected over the phones although the software employed turns the voice input into digital data and transmits them over the Internet to the recipient where it is turned back into sound.

 Domestic calls over this service will cost the user 1.7 cents a minute while calling overseas will cost them more. The Austrian company Jajah arrived in the crowded VoIP arena last summer with its for-fee PC-to-phone calling application. The low cost of the service was enough to attract people.

 This highly competitive market is poised for explosive growth and to compete with land-based telephone service especially with technology companies like Vonage developing gadgets that link land phones with a broadband connection.