Google Plans Free VoIP In the UK

jarich writes "According to this news article, Google may be preparing to offer free Voice Over IP telephone service in the UK. This sounds related to a previous Slashdot article about Google starting to buy dark fiber. So what are they planning? A free service like Skype (computer to computer only) or more along the lines of Lingo or Vonage?"

Comments

Endgame

[locokamil]

Once again, I find myself wondering what Google's endgame is. Are they going to remain at the forefront of search technology, or are they going to attempt to orchestrate an M$ style invasion of our lives?

Re:Endgame

[ScentCone]

Oh, come on. Besides, just about all we hear on slashdot are people who would only be happy if everything, in every form, was operating on Linux, making slashdotters the new priesthood.

Every growing company isn't evil. Every dollar earned isn't corrupt. When two people form a partnership, is that bad? How about when two hundred form a company, or two thousand form a corporation? Lots of chat here about the importance of scalability - just not when it comes to farsighted or well-run groups of people serving a market.

Go Google. And go all the Windows users, too, who will keep on using it, and make phone calls, too, apparently.

Re:Endgame

[seanadams.com]

Once again, I find myself wondering what Google's endgame is.

Great businesses don't have "endgames". Microsoft has no "endgame" - their goal is to have all the money. It's not something you can ever finish, but that doesn't mean you can't make it your goal.

Google's goal seems to be having ALL the information. There's a hell of a lot of info on the phone lines so it makes sense to go there once you've got a handle on the web.

Re:Endgame

[locokamil]

It seems to me that Google's business model revolves around (gross oversimplification follows) simply throwing out targetted advertisements when they hear a keyword.

I can't see how a phone based system can rely on that business model. As many of the more comical posts on this article have pointed out, a third party interrupting a phone conversation with an ad about some product or the other is... well... annoying. No one is going to use such a service.

What it all boils down to is that Google is trying to diversify into areas where it has little or no chance of making money in. While it does so, it is going to ignore what its good at... and lose its search muscle to MSN or Yahoo. And while this speaks highly of the market economy, it doesn't really promote the idea that Google is run by highly intelligent people.

Re:Endgame

[HuguesT]

Replace endgame with "vision" or business plan.

MS has a vision (windows everywhere) and a business plan (own the O/S everywhere from cell phones to supercomputers, crush everybody that disagrees, leverage O/S dominance to applications).

You don't see MS diversifying into airlines, insurance, manufacturing, automobiles and whatnot.

The question is: what is Google up to? Are they on a collision course with Microsoft in the short term ?

In the last few months they have been putting out products for the windows platform only: hard disk search tools, image indexing tools, etc.

To me this means that Google is getting less interested in the search business. Are they going to turn into some run-of-the-mill software house for the windows platform only or are they up to something else?

Wait, lets think about this.

[Alazoral]

I greatly doubt that Google is going to offer VoIP. Google is a search company. VoIP so greatly differs from any of their other products, mission statements and plans that its quite obvious that either they aren't going to be offering VoIP, or that the new product will have VoIP as the sideline to something else. And before you say 'Google does communication tools as well, see G-Mail, Groups and so forth', let me remind you that G-Mail's whole concept is the instant searchability of emails, allowing you to store as many as you want without having to spend time organising them. Groups allows you to search intelligently across a decade of Usenet posts. The sending/posting communication aspects are merely natural sidelines. What about Orkut? Lets you search for people, and the links between them. Blogger? Creates easily searchable content. The thing that strikes me about VoIP is that it is entirely unsearchable with present technology. It would require an impossibly accurate voice recognition engine that could dynamically sync with a soundbyte. And it doesn't appear particularly useful either. So, my bet? Either this article is following red herrings, or its not getting the whole story.

Focus?

[maelstrom]

Is it just me or is Google getting a little unfocused with too many acquisitions and weird plans like this? How about spending some time on your core business, your google groups "upgrade" was three step backwards.

Focus.

What Skype is missing though... Skype IN

[buro9]

Skype to Skype... fine, cool, fantastic.

Skype to Phone... fine, cool, fantastic.

Phone to Skype... missing link.

Without that last bit there is no incentive for someone to make a move to VOIP on a permanent basis for all of their calls.

Why? Because you still have to keep a landline or mobile to be able to receive calls from regular phones... and because the cost of making a call to a mobile is prohibitive, it's likely that you keep a bundled (with TV package) landline.

If the weight Google helps to make this a feature that is developed, then we may start to see a willingness to switch in large numbers a reality.

As it stands at the moment... my (red neck equiv') mother was impressed, but she just sees it as one more way to do things, and she's very lazy and is still more likely to pick up and dial a regular phone. Show her she doesn't need the landline (by receiving calls, thus 100% functionality) and then there'll be something impressive.

What has all this to do with Google? Well Skype In as I'll call it... it requires a network, something has to receive calls and store messages for you whilst your computer is off... who's to say context related sound adverts wouldn't be appended to the answer phone service... how would that differ from Gmail advertising?

Things to think about :)

Re:Possible Google Plan...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't understand why everybody thinks Google is going to offer telephone service. They haven't said anything that would give that impression, and AFAIK nobody has any information linking Google with VOIP at all! Everybody is just extrapolating because they are making a high-capacity global network. Isn't it possible that Google might want a high-capacity global network for a different reason? They are a network company after all! Let's not jump to conclusions here.

Total message integration

[Animats]

Voicemail shows up in your gmail inbox, e-mail gets summarized in voice messages, voicemail is indexed...

And it all has ads.

*scratches head*

[TheSHAD0W]

This article seems to be taking a huge speculative leap. Google is investing in heavy bandwidth - therefore, it must be for VoIP? Either there's evidence the reporter isn't revealing, or someone has telephony on the brain.

No substance corroborating the statement

[sipmeister]

Can someone please point out where in the article the claim that Google will offer VoIP service is substantiated? As far as I can tell, it's based on speculations by "Julian Hewitt, senior partner at Ovum, a telecoms consultancy".

Some comments on the article below:

"The technology that will enable Google to move in on the market has been around for some time. Software by the London-based company, Skype, has been downloaded nearly 54 million times around the world but no large telecommunication firms have properly exploited it."

The technology has indeed been around for a long time, and Skype, a proprietary walled garden system, is definitely not the first or only one to use it. So why is Skype implicated here?

"The basic cost of making calls across the internet is almost nil. The real cost is in developing the software; after that, the service exploits available internet capacity."

So why would Google buy dark fiber if the call "exploits available internet capacity"?

"In addition, the sound quality of calls across the internet can be poor and the connections can be less reliable."

As can been witnessed by using Skype, or other applications which incorporate modern codecs, for example the freely available wideband iLBC codec (http://www.ilbcfreeware.org), the voice quality over a broadband connection is usually excellent, in the case of iLBC much better then PSTN. The biggest issue is latency, which is increased in the case of Skype, where calls are often routed over media proxies to traverse NAT's.

Overall a poor article, "By Elizabeth Judge, Telecoms Correspondent". But what can be expected of the Times?

5 second add

[Anonymous Coward]

I could see google putting a 5 second add before dialing. That is about as long as I would wait b4 I got pissed. Hear me out - I think they will offer the phone service for free and they will make money by making advertisers pay to place their 5second add before the phone connects to the other person. That way the person dialing is forced to listen to the add (though the person could just as easily ignore it as well). However, This is much better than getting interrupted at dinner time by a telemarketer. At the point that you have chosen to make a call you are a captive audience. This is great win win situation for everyone. VOIP calls will be free and advertisters will foot the bill (w/ possible revenue to gain from the marketing though voice ads). It would be interesting to see how google sets up the UI for the VOIP - would there be text/image ads that appear while you are making your call or would it purely be a prerecorded message? What is the longest amount of time that a person would listen to an ad before hanging up, maybe they could only do voice ads once every 10 calls so it would be staggered.

Interesting points:

1. Google could listen (randomly) to the conversations and note down the frequency of words being uttered. This would correlate well with any of their search methodologies because because talking about a topic will surely lead to people searching about that same topic.

2. The people making VOIP phone calls have time, some money (they had to somehow get on the internet to make the call right?), and possibly some education. For higher margin products these are the people that you want to spend your advertising dollars on.

3. Cross-sell, upsell Google can offer people with gmail additional VOIP accounts. Again these are people that like google and are willing to use its services.

4. Google gains more public karma by doing things that benefit mankind while making some money on the side - to build more things to better mankind.

5. Owning yet another medium is lucrative and would be a great chance for them to learn another business without spending a ridiculous amount of money like the telecoms in the 1990's.

6. This could be a play to compete with microsoft in terms of becoming a global ISP that sifts through __everyone__'s information and preferences. Can you imagine how powerful this would make them? The would be able to potentially control almost all the "new" (internet, voip, videophone) advertising by amassing an enormous amount of data!

7. Videophones will become a reality in the next 10 to 15 years. Google could put an advertisement (picture in picture) while giving away the voice call for free. Again - advertisers would foot the bill while the service remained free. I think that is key - by keeping the basic service free they get far more people than if they charged money for it.

8. With TV usage declining and internet usage going on, google will win in the long run :) as long as they keep innovating!

Anuj Goyal
anuj_dot_goyal_at_gmail_com

come on google :) hire me!

not really

[Ghost_3k]

Has anyone actually read that article?

Although Google is reluctant to talk about its plans, the logical use of such a network would be to help to support a new telephone service.

So, if any big company has open jobs for "strategic negotiator" to help the company to provide a "global backbone network", does that mean it's going to start a voip service?

Is it really only me who thinks that this articole is speculating, no facts, no evidence...nothing...

ghost_3k