Be very afraid: Google Voice has landed
12/03/2009 - by TelecomTV One
web20.telecomtv.com
Today is the day many in the telecoms industry have been expecting (and, let's face it, fearing) for years... well for at least 18 months. For it was in July 2007, after much rumour and speculation, that Google bought an Internet-based voice service called GrandCentral and locked itself in a room with it. Today it's revealed what it's been up to all that time. Google has entered the voice market.
If you have a Gmail account you tend to look at the page layout and feel that there's something missing.. well you do if you're in telecoms.
Down the left side is a list of all your email contacts. If they too are Gmail users there is a 'presence' function working away so you can hit the 'chat' button and have an instant messaging conversation. In the contact view you can enter their telephone numbers as well as their email addresses.
You're left thinking: 'All the elements are in place, so where's the 'call' button?'
It's about to arrive. Google has announced Google Voice, an add-on service to the Google comms applications set that will do just that.
This is not VoIP (at least not yet). It's web-enabled telephony along the lines of the service offered by Jajah as we in fact predicted it might in an earlier (almost right) story last year (see Ribbit and Jajah: an almost-rodent and an existential thingy, but have they been bought?)
Instead of handling the media plane (trying to get IP voice streams to struggle across access networks, like Skype) Google, like Jajah, handles the upper levels of the control plane by sitting in the centre of the network and running a presence and availability function for its users and, as the old GrandCentral name implies, enabling them to manage incoming calls (from a GrandCentral number) and initiate outgoing ones.
The service will be available first in the US and then will be extended to other countries.
In fact the key thrust of GrandCentral when bought by Google reflected the oddity of the US voice market in that it concentrated on managing incoming calls which, if they're to a mobile, get paid for by the recipient rather than the caller.
So the big selling point in the US is to be able to screen calls as they come in (Google says, just as you used to with the old-fashioned home message machine) and to route them to the appropriate phone (the landline you happen to be beside preferably).
Other features on Google Voice include an automated voicemail transcription service and the ability to send and receive text messages.
Continues after advertisement.
Click here to find out more!
Users can also make free calls TO any number in the US using the calling feature. Like Jajah, Google Voice will initiate outgoing calls (and set up conference calls).
The user can click on a name and Google calls a user-designated phone (preferably on the desk beside the computer) and then makes a connection to the target phone (the call recipient).
Google is currently saying it wants to make its local calls free. While this is practical in the US because of the interconnect and accounting rules there, Google will have to charge for international calls and users can purchase credits to make them, although there is no information yet on rates.
The 'paid-for' charging model will almost certainly have to apply to the rest of the world where interconnect is charged on a per minute basis, unless it plans on absorbing the wholesale call charges for both the initiating and terminating call segments and pay for them through advertising. That really would revolutionise global telephony!
The really interesting thing is where all this goes with Android (or any browser-equipped smartphone for that matter). If Nokia was reportedly in hot water with some mobile carriers by putting Skype on one of its smartphones, then mobile operators must be doubly worried by the prospect of Google disintermediating them by offering call control via the Internet.
And then there's Android. With Google Voice as it's currently offered, operators are being consigned to the role of 'voice pipe' in the Google environment. They still get to set up and manage calls, but they must provide them wholesale to Google.
Now, with Android, Google has the ability to completely disintermediate the mobile operators by setting up VoIP clients on the handsets (like Skype) and transferring all the voice value to the bit pipe, completely under its own control.
Google is currently saying that these are early days and that there are many fascinating developments to come. We can bet on it. |
