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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?"
Why would they do that?
"Do no evil" does not also mean "Do stupid".
I wonder if this is a step towards making VoIP basically a free tool, much like the web is today. It would be interesting if Google or another
VoIP provider go to an advertising model to support free VoIP.
I think it would be interesting to have ads while a call is being connected (i.e. ringing). It seems like they could pipe audio ads down the wire during the inevitable pause while the system tries to track down a cell phone, or the long distance call is being routed...
A company like Google could also put a phone front end on to the search engine, I'm thinking along the lines of directory assistance, but instead of limiting info to just addresses / phones numbers, the Google directory assistance would search the internet and speak the results (and a few related ads) over the phone.
They might even have the CPU power to do adequate speech recognotion. All told it is pretty easy to imagine a system taking adavtage of the newest phones, with enhanced SMS, web interfaces, along with a voice interface. It would also be cool if you could specify where you want your search result output to go. Maybe if they had VoIP and some type of phone based interafce you could have your results displayed on your phone, pda or spoken. With a viable VoIP perhaps you could have the results faxed to you at a hotel. I'd also like to see the option of having the results emailed.
All told these relatively small technical advancements, would be large strides in making Google even more ubiqutious. Non-computer users and casual users would have another resource to get and retrieve information in the "real-world".
I just wish I was smart enough to get a job with them . . .
...but I'd love to know how they're going to add unobtrusive advertising to a phone conversation.
I wonder the same thing!
Such is the problem of being a public company - constant pressure to be a jack of all trades and master of none. Expansion, expansion, expansion. Diversify! Must make more profit for greedy stock holders.
IMO, companies should only sell their stock to employees. Not that I've thought about it much. I just wish companies could be left to do what they do well, instead of being forced to keep trying to rule the world.
I'd be happy about Google diversifying if I knew that their core competencies were not being compromised. But from what I hear from inside Camp Google, people are being stretched too far, too fast, and search, although important, is taking a backseat to rapid (and often not very well thought out) expansion. That worries me... and it should worry you too, because rapid expansion into everything results in buggy products that promise the world, but in the end crash every 20 minutes or so. Like MS products.
You can only go so far on as limited a platform as search technology, and Google has done more with it then anyone could have imagined 5 years ago. So, they've got a great stable core (and I don't imagine they will abandon it to work on things like this, development will continue to keep them better then everyone else) and now have the LUXURY of expanding into other markets. Kudos to them for making it work.
Google should buy Skype... why reinvent the wheel?
Better yet: Voice conversations gets indexed too and our previous telephone calls are suddenly searchable. This could be rather usefull, just as looking up old mails is today, but of course various matters (like privacy and storage) needs to be sorted out first.
There used to be one that used advertisements to support the service of free long distance... Freeway, I believe the name was (but don't quote me on that). I used it quite often as an alternative to buying numerous phone cards every week, and never had a problem with it.
Basically, it worked out like this: Dial a 1-800 number, put in your personal pin number, listen to a fifteen-second ad. You just earned two minutes. Push # to hear another ad (for another two minutes), or * to make your call. There was no limit to the amount of ads you could listen to, so you could (and I did) just keep pushing the button to rack up an hours worth of time before making the call. There were no ads played during the call, no interruptions, nada.
Of course, it really sucked when you built up a fair amount of time, only to dial a wrong number or find out that the person you're calling wasn't home.
It's a bit like wondering, "but what if deep down google really is evil." Google claim their ethos i to do no evil, but if I were truly evil, and out to do as much evil as i could - a genuine evil-doer in fact, the first thing I'd tell people is I am devoted to not doing evil. So Google's very prominent "we are not evil" claim is truly the first evidence that they are in fact as evil as Hitler.
If google are evil then their endgame still just is as murky as if they are benign. I mean say you are google - what do you want this to be? is google going to announce google currency, google implants a google health care system? the google army? "google squad". With luck google will become OCP. Good business is where they find it.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Yahoo has it (VoIP via Yahoo messenger).
Yahoo is a search company.
Why shouldn't Google have it?
Google frightens me. I know their motto is "Do no evil" but ...
Consider this:
* They have one of the world's largest compute clusters.
* They have the demonstrated capability to use that cluster effectively.
* They've practically centralized all of the web in their cache. Even though you can ask for a site to be removed from the cache, I expect that all that does is hide the cache from the outside world - google still has a copy.
* Now they have all your email too, if you've signed up for a gmail account. If you haven't, chances are that someone you communicate with has a gmail account. So they have some of your email too.
* They have some link with the spooks - I've seen job ads from Google for the East Coast which require security clearance.
* If in fact they're going to do VOIP, I think it's just to get VOIP centralized as well.
Maybe your favourite TLA is paying them to do this. Who knows how much money they have.
Certainly Google has the capability if not the intent to do a lot of evil.
And I'm not sure they're all that clean - look at the way they cozied up to China and the way the Abu Ghraib images vanished out of their image caches. In one case they're supporting evil, and in the other case they're hiding evil.
Of course it is. The way to deal with jitter is to buffer the incoming packets and play them back at a uniformed rate. As long as you can keep the end-to-end delay below about 150 ms it won't be noticed by people, below 250 ms there is a slight delay and over 250 ms is classed as unaccetpable. Unfortunetly in VoIP delay times at routers can eat up a lot of this time. There are lots of papers on how to deal with jitter but if your jitter is only 3 ms there is no point in doing anything about it.
If it's by ear then please remember it is impossible to measure 3Ms.
If you are talking by ear upto 40 ms jitter is not noticiable by people, between 40 and 75 is classed as good quality but with occasional delays while over 75 ms be unacceptable. This is according to the ITU.
The work I do with VoIP we struggle to get 15 Ms.
Megaseconds? Sounds like a pretty duff system to me. But 15 ms jitter should be fine for the human perception system and shouldn't be noticed.
I always had problems with that statement since it is meaningless since evil is undefined. They may think nothing they do is evil but other will disagree. For example I eat meat so to some people I'm an evil cow killer. To me isn't wasn't a bad thing it was just lunch. It is all just a matter of your viewpoint.