Posted on 01/23/2005 6:32:07 PM PST by aculeus
GOOGLE revolutionised the internet. Now it is hoping to do the same with our phones.
The company behind the US-based internet search engine looks set to launch a free telephone service that links users via a broadband internet connection using a headset and home computer.
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.
BT, which connects seven out of ten British households, has developed its own internet-telephone service. However, the telephone giant, which has the most to lose if the new technology takes off, has been reluctant to promote it heavily.
Julian Hewitt, senior partner at Ovum, a telecoms consultancy, said: “From a telecoms perspective there is a big appeal in the fact that Google is a search operation — and of course the Google brand is a huge draw.”
Mr Hewitt said that a Google telephone service could be made to link with the Google search engine, which already conducts half of all internet inquiries made around the world. A surfer looking for a clothes retailer could simply find the web site and click on the screen to speak to the shop.
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. However, charging does become necessary to link internet calls with the traditional phone network.
In addition, the sound quality of calls across the internet can be poor and the connections can be less reliable.
A recent job advert by Google’s on its website calls for a “strategic negotiator” to help the company to provide a “global backbone network” — a high-capacity international infrastructure.
By investing in capacity, Google could circumvent the problems of quality and reliability and guarantee better service.
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. The company would buy capacity cheaply, by taking up slack capacity left behind when the internet bubble collapsed in 2001.
Around the world, thousands of miles of fibre-optic cable remain unused because the amount of speculative development vastly exceeded demand. Such capacity would be available at rock-bottom prices today.
Elsewhere in the world, using the internet to make phone calls has caught on more quickly. In Japan 10 per cent of households already use the so-called “voice over internet protocol” and an internet service offered by Softband has 4.4 million subscribers. Its growth has depressed revenues of the local telecom group, NTT.
In the US, a company called Vonage offers customers unlimited calls each month for as little as $24 (less than £13).
Big companies and multinationals that make huge numbers of long-distance calls are also increasingly switching to internet calls to try to slash their bills.
Google, which was founded in 1996, built its business from scratch by offering a fast, reliable and free internet search. It gradually transformed into a highly profitable company by offering commercial services, including sponsored web links.
Its most up-to-date figures show that, in the first nine months of 2004, Google made a profit of $195 million on revenues of $2.1 billion.
START OF THE BIG SEARCH # Stanford University graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page began working on Google’s search-engine technology in 1996 when they were in their early twenties
# They tried to find a buyer for their work but were forced to set up their own company in 1998 because nobody was interested
# Two years later Google became the biggest search engine on the web
# Google was forced to go public during 2004, so that some of its founding investors could make a profit. The company raised $26 million; its initial market value at float was one thousand times greater # The company’s motto is “Don’t Be Evil”
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
Telephone service in Europe and Asia is very expensive. This could be a very smart move by Google.
I've used Skype. It's interesting software, but not ready for primetime until they get better quality of the connection. It's probably inadequate server power or bandwith into their servers, but conversations on Skype can be nearly unintelligble at times, and the lag is quite noticeable.
But, as with everything in this industry, it will change. It's certainly got potential.
Google could kill off some telecom dinosaurs if they dont wake up and change.
Yeah i guess it all depends on the bandwidth. I've had regular calls to the UK and Australia that sounded great! But like you said it's the equipment and bandwidth.
There is really no reason why phone service and internet service should be distinct. Nor is there any reason why a phone call should cost any more than listening to audio clip or viewing a video on the net. There are mainly two pieces missing:
This is obviously the wave of the future.
But it's not free. If internet phone service drives the phone companies out of business, someone is going to have to pick up the pieces and maintain all those miles of wire and cable that permit the internet to operate.
That is, unless we go to satellite transmission, but that's not free either. To some extent, I believe, internet users have been piggy-backing on the phone companies and the cable TV companies. But someone has to pay for the infrastructure, one way or another.
One thing is for sure. Since the computer and internet revolutions, the one constant is change. Today's latest technology is tomorrow's door stopper.
Another VOiP service, www.lingo.com, is offering unlimited calling to the US, Canada, UK, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, South Korea and Guam for $34.95 a month. Unbelievable. They have a similar plan for Europe.
I'll probably be working abroad soon and will buy the Vonage Softphone, basically a telephone emulator on your PC for an extra $10/month (for 500 minutes use), including whatever US phone number you want. SO I'll be sitting overseas with my local American number, can call anyone in the US for 5 cents a minute, and friends and family will be able to call me overseas using my local US number.
VOiP technology has made remarkable progress since 1998, when I tried using a point-to-point Internet "telephone" for some calls to another user in Asia. It was terrible, connections kept breaking and stalling, perhaps because the last hop of my pal's connection was a 64K sat circuit.
Or, just take the Vonage box along and buy a regular phone when you arrive. It will "just work". The power brick on the ATA-186 Vonage gave me is universal, takes 100-240V . I am currently in the Philippines and it works perfect.
Nope, not bandwidth, but latency - roughly the amount of time it takes to "ping" the other side. The actual bandwidth required isn't all that great.
ping
There was a website back in 99/00 that offered this service. Dialpad.com. I think it's still around but no longer free.
A friend of mine had Vonage and liked it, but has now switched to Lingo and likes that even better. His wife is German, and she gives it a workout calling the old country.
I'd do that, but we'll be leaving it in the States for home phone service.
Good to hear you're using it in the Philipines, I'm pretty sure that Vonage is sticking with the 150 ms guideline for VOiP connections (in other words, that you need 150 ms point-to-point connections for VOiP to work well). So they don't guarantee that it works everywhere. The connection I'll be using abroad has already been tested using Vonage, and it works even with at least one sat hop.
It's like pulling teeth to get AT&T to admit their box will work in foreign countries. They're still trying to protect their copper LD franchise while selling VOiP accounts. Bozos.
I've been using Skype within the USA for a few weeks for PC-to-PC calling. The quality is unbelievably good (far better than telco service, and as good as face-to-face), lag time is unnoticeable and connections rock-solid so far. And, at free, the price is right. Haven't tried international or dialing outside the Internet yet.
I'm happy.
Can you provide a link for this sort of direct-link VoIP software? I like Skype, but I knew direct-link ought to be possible if you know the IP addresses. Would be nice to be independent of centralized lookup databases just in case.
I think we ought to promote VoIP to as many people as possible, and get them using it at least occasionally. We need to get millions of people to like it before Big Stupid Government tries to squish it due to Big Telco lobbyists.
This is true, but Google is in the directory business, not telephony.
They'll end up buying one of the VOiP companies, Skype or Vonage or Lingo, provide really cheap LD service, and make money building a "Google phone directory" and linking it to ads and other search services.
If you have a robust directory architecture and migrate users to your service for telephony, you don't really need phone numbers to locate other users on the system. Just unique IDs mapped to IP addresses. Phone numbers are simply unique string indentifiers. Nothing more.
Looks to me as if Google is out to coopt and perhaps break the entire model of telephony based on phone numbers.
Very interesting. It would be cool if you could do this yourself for free via software, but I don't know if that would be possible. You probably would have to use their service.
I think Google has understood that the monetary value of telephony is in the directory, not in the copper.
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