Google Plans Free VoIP In the UK

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Plans Free VoIP In the UK

Posted by timothy on Sunday January 23, 2005 @06:49PM from the thinking-ahead dept.

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?"

18 of 226 comments (clear)

Skype is not computer to computer only by Nermal6693 · 2005-01-23 18:52 · Score: 5, Informative

You can also call a regular phone with Skype. It's not free, but you can do it.
1. Re:Skype is not computer to computer only by arivanov · 2005-01-23 19:34 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Two dedicated VOIP operators - Gossip Telecom and one more which specializes in businesses and offers IP Centrex style solutions (fully outsourced VOIP PBX). These are dependant on your link so your mileage is likely to vary.
  Also at least some ISPs have started offering VOIP as an addon at a minimal cost. Once again, mileage will vary except possibly Nildram. Speaking out of experience (done some measurements on their network and have a non-UK VOIP phone on it): they have nearly 0% packet loss (around 0.01% which is the loss from DSL) and under 3ms jitter. Even the shitties VOIP implementation just works. Of course this does not come out of the blue. They charge you 25 monthly for a static IP with the relevant services attached while the industry average is around 23.
  
  --
  Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
  http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Kind of restrictive... by stever00t · 2005-01-23 18:53 · Score: 5, Funny

There's a 32 word limit per call.
Endgame by locokamil · 2005-01-23 18:53 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?
1. Re:Endgame by seanadams.com · 2005-01-23 19:09 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:Endgame by locokamil · 2005-01-23 19:24 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
3. Re:Endgame by MMMDI · 2005-01-23 20:39 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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.
Possible Google Plan... by madstork2000 · 2005-01-23 18:53 · Score: 5, Interesting

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 . . .
1. Re:Possible Google Plan... by grcumb · 2005-01-23 22:10 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  "But I think google will not even have ads on thier VoIP, they are thinking bigger:"
  
  Or, they're thinking simpler. What do you do when you're talking on your home phone? You idle the time away, gazing abstractedly around you.
  
  I worked for a VOIP company who shall remain nameless. In that time, our business unit beta-tested a VOIP handset that had a fairly functional web interface built into it. The early versions had monochrome display, but the newer ones had colour. They were fed by standard CGI scripts.
  
  It's fairly easy these days to do text to speech, and with a display on the handset, you could be served up text ads as you talk. They would be about as unobtrusive as their current set of web ads are, and people would be getting their phone calls - anywhere in the world - for free.
  
  If that's not a viable business model, I don't know what is.
  
  --
  Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
fixed link by Devil's+BSD · 2005-01-23 18:53 · Score: 5, Informative

Someone left a bracket on there, so...
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1454225, 00.html

--
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Re:Thinking really hard here by ejdmoo · 2005-01-23 19:01 · Score: 4, Funny

They're going to voice scan your calls and every 5 minutes there will be an interruption by a commercial.

"Hey Bob, how's that car working for ya'?"

*beep beep*

"Come on down to Steve's auto extravaganza!!! We will NOT be oversold!"
What Skype is missing though... Skype IN by buro9 · 2005-01-23 19:07 · Score: 5, Insightful

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 :)
1. Re:What Skype is missing though... Skype IN by blake182 · 2005-01-23 20:33 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  There was an interview on Engadget last November with Skype co-founder and CEO Niklas Zennström:
  
  What is SkypeIn and what are the plans for it?
  
  SkypeIn will allow phone calls from the traditional phone network in to Skype. We don't have a specific launch date yet, but hope to offer it sometime this winter.
Total message integration by Animats · 2005-01-23 19:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

Voicemail shows up in your gmail inbox, e-mail gets summarized in voice messages, voicemail is indexed...
And it all has ads.
*scratches head* by TheSHAD0W · 2005-01-23 19:47 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
Re:Thinking really hard here by 1u3hr · 2005-01-23 20:02 · Score: 4, Informative

hey're going to voice scan your calls and every 5 minutes there will be an interruption by a commercial.
In TFA "a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer." So they would surely display ads while you're making the call. Even conceivably targetted from speech recognition, but that's a long shot and likely to spook people.
No substance corroborating the statement by sipmeister · 2005-01-23 20:57 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?
not really by Ghost_3k · 2005-01-23 23:06 · Score: 4, Insightful

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