Why AT&T Killed iPhone Google Voice

ZuchinniOne writes "The Wall Street Journal has a very interesting article about the likely reasons that AT&T and Apple killed the Google Voice application. 'With Google Voice, you have one Google phone number that callers use to reach you, and you pick up whichever phone — office, home or cellular — rings. You can screen calls, listen in before answering, record calls, read transcripts of your voicemails, and do free conference calls. Domestic calls and texting are free, and international calls to Europe are two cents a minute. In other words, a unified voice system, something a real phone company should have offered years ago.'"

Comments

Re:"texting is free"...?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

You're assuming it's still sent over the SMS portion of the network. I imagine GV app could set up push notifications to just use the data network, ...

Note that SMS messages share the (very low bandwidth) control channel with all the other control messages. While SMS pricing is, of course, "all the traffic will bear", it CAN'T be free, because it must be rationed somehow. (It would be trivial to build an IP-over-SMS tunnel and swamp it.) Charging ten cents per 120-payload-byte packet keeps the traffic down to something the channel can handle - even with the texting explosion.

Switch it to the broadband data channel and a text message effectively becomes a minuscule email (fitting into a single tiny packet) with a vanishingly small cost. It's fine for that to be "free", meaning "having a marginal cost" like an elevator ride, i.e. "too cheap to meter, include it in the flat-rate overhead".

Re:No.

[BitZtream]

As a iPhone owner and Google Voice users I can safely say while Visual voice mail is awesome, its not WHY I bought my iPhone. The iPod and first web browser that didn't suck ass on a phone would be far in front of visual voice mail.

GV is nifty but its not that impressive, its just basically a public version of an astrisk box that you don't have to maintain. The only difference between what it has right now and an asterisk box is that I don't have to worry about futzing with the asterisk machine when it gets loopy, for other less technical people, GV is obviously easier to do it with.

GV is still missing the most absolutely vital component to the whole picture. GV is useless without a computer or phone to listen to or read your messages on, so GV without a phone is useless. an iPhone without GV is still pretty useful, although you can't sign up for GV from mobile safari for some reason.

Visual voice mail was no more difficult for them than setting up the blackberry email push systems. I hate when people just spew some random bullshit and get marketed insightful.

When you can get Google voice to act as the handset for me, then maybe we'll talk, until then you're just a google fanboy trying to be a iphone hater.

Heres a hint, you suck at both.