SAN FRANCISCO — Time Warner Inc.'s AOL said it will soon discontinue its TotalTalk Internet-phone service, which has failed to gain much of a following since its debut nearly a year ago.

The AOL feature getting the ax on Nov. 30 was designed to completely replace an existing home or office phone.

Despite high hopes, TotalTalk managed to attract just 2,000 subscribers since its debut in October. That's a mere wisp of a showing when compared with 1.8 million subscribers of leading providers Vonage Holdings Corp. of Holmdel, N.J., and cable operator Comcast Corp.

AOL spokeswoman Anne Bentley said last week that AOL will continue to focus on AIM Phoneline, its six-month-old Net phone feature meant to be a cheap alternative for a second or third home-phone line.

"We've learned a lot from the introduction of the TotalTalk, and have made a strategic decision for now to focus on our AIM Phoneline service," Bentley said.

AIM Phoneline is contained in AOL's popular AIM instant messenger. When using the feature, computers can dial up other computers and receive incoming calls from cell or landline phones for free, while AOL charges customers a per-minute fee to make outgoing calls to traditional phones.

To a large degree, the AOL retrenching demonstrates how the U.S. Internet-telephony market isn't yet large enough to support lots of different competitive services, and how just a handful of major operators serve most of the estimated 5 million U.S. homes or offices that have switched over.

Despite AOL's actions, there's ample evidence suggesting that Internet telephony, which is loosely defined as using a broadband connection for making and receiving phone calls, is indeed resonating with U.S. consumers.

Net-phone experts expect the number of U.S. Internet-telephony customers to reach 15.1 million in 2007 and 32 million in 2010 because the quality of the calls has improved, and Net-phone plans are usually much cheaper than traditional telephony service.

Meanwhile, America Online last week launched an expanded version of its online music service that offers unlimited downloads of music videos for a subscription fee, as well as more than 200 new radio stations, including several from XM Satellite Radio.

The initiative represents another step in the Time Warner-owned subsidiary's attempt to transform itself from an access provider to a full-service entertainment destination driven by the AOL.com portal. Dick Parsons, chairman of Time Warner, has pointed to an AOL turnaround as the key to lifting the parent's stock price out of the $16-to-$19 trading range it has been mired in over the past two years.