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Google Plans Free VoIP In the UK
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Jan 24, 2005 01:49 AM
from the thinking-ahead dept.
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?"
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Google Plans Free VoIP In the UK
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Thinking really hard here (Score:1, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday December 24 2004, @08:49PM)
"Do no evil" does not also mean "Do stupid".
Re:Thinking really hard here (Score:5, Funny)
"Hey Bob, how's that car working for ya'?"
*beep beep*
"Come on down to Steve's auto extravaganza!!! We will NOT be oversold!"
Re:Thinking really hard here (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Skype is not computer to computer only (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Skype is not computer to computer only (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.sigsegv.cx/)
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.
Kind of restrictive... (Score:5, Funny)
Endgame (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.anserinae.net/)
Re:Endgame (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.seanadams.com/)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.anserinae.net/)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.moviesmademe.com/)
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.
Re:Endgame (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Possible Google Plan... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://humc.us/)
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 . . .
Re:Possible Google Plan... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.imagicity.com/)
"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.
fixed link (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.devilsbsd.net/)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1454225
Alternate article (Score:1, Redundant)
thats cool, but i wish for canada (Score:1)
(http://mitrick.homeip.net/)
Interesting premise, but.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Copy of Article (Score:1, Informative)
Google gears up for a free-phone challenge to BT
By Elizabeth Judge, Telecoms Correspondent
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 bigg
Google plans to take this to the US as well (Score:1)
Coral good-link (Score:2)
(http://homepage.mac.com/mikemunson/)
Wait, lets think about this. (Score:1, Insightful)
(http://chaoseffect.com/)
Focus? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://hivearchive.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday March 07 2002, @10:39PM)
Focus.
What Skype is missing though... Skype IN (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.bowlie.com/forum/)
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:What Skype is missing though... Skype IN (Score:5, Informative)
Tin Foil Hat (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 18, @06:33PM)
VOIP is digital, and quite searchable with a text-to-speech converter. What if google wants to make your conversations searchable?
What if you make defamatory comments about GW? (or whoever is the power-that-be of the day)
What if they made it searchable, but didn't tell anybody?
Google is smarter than we all thought.... (Score:1)
(http://www.holyhell.net/)
Im imagining a Skype-like program that can also recieve calls from landlines (with cheaper rates). Also, the ability to record a conversation and then search a database of them would be interesting (but it would eat space and horsepower).
Hey! I can dream!
How Will Google Apply Search Engine on This? (Score:1)
A link that works (Score:1, Redundant)
(http://www.omegasphere.net/)
Superpower? (Score:1)
(http://mboverload.no-ip.org/tech.html | Last Journal: Tuesday July 13 2004, @01:54PM)
I know they have that "don't be bad" thing going on, but all it takes is one management change to turn Google into the most hated company around (SCO). I like their email and search, but doesn't this go too far?
Google could be the next DuPont or Monsanto. All products, from detergent to cat litter could be Google branded. "Let Google search out your stains with our StainRank system!" or "Our litter uses our search technology to find and destroy litter box odors!" What if in 20 years this really does happen? Let's hope the "don't be bad" doctrine will still resonate with Google's next CEO.
Re:Superpower? (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday November 19, @08:23AM)
"Do no evil"
slogan had
"...yet, be patient my pretty ones. Har ha ha ha har."
appended to it in bloood red letters that faded as I watched...
I wonder what it means?
Total message integration (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.animats.com)
And it all has ads.
*scratches head* (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.shambala.net)
Find with Google, chat with Google, meet with... (Score:1)
(http://radio.weblogs.com/0112083/)
Google Should Buy Skype (Score:1, Interesting)
Is this really true? (Score:1)
(http://abhijit.adotout.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday March 18 2003, @01:03PM)
# 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
Is this really the case ?
# The company's motto is "Don't Be Evil"
Isn't it "Do no evil"
Silence! (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday December 19 2004, @06:50AM)
But the fact is this is all wild *Speculation*. In fact, it does not make sense for google to get into VOIP and there are several more plausible reasons for google to look into buying fiber.
Think about that for a second, take a deep breath, move on.
More Likely? (Score:2)
(http://miyakohouou.dyndns.org/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 07 2004, @01:15AM)
If they were working on a new project though, it would seem more likely to me that it would be some aspect of a new search technology or something, maybe for big businesses (seems to me like google could make a killing selling custom database or indexing software for businesses, I would imagine that a lot of business problems would mirror the problem of indexing and searching information on the web, if a group of smart and talented people were to put the software together).
so what... (Score:1)
(http://tektek.org/)
No substance corroborating the statement (Score:5, Insightful)
Some comments on the article below:
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? So why would Google buy dark fiber if the call "exploits available internet capacity"? 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 [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?
Just one thing (Score:1)
(http://dragonheart.uni.cc/ | Last Journal: Tuesday February 22 2005, @01:51AM)
Ubiquitous Data infrastructure (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 02 2005, @03:43AM)
They're digitizing every book that they can get their hands on.
They're buying up dark fiber.
They'll be offering free VOIP.
To me, this suggests that they're building towards a mixture of data delivery services and a multihomed caching company like Akamai.
Infrastructure and content eventually lead inevitably to multimedia, to movies on demand. They won't care where you get your last mile of broadband IP connectivity from, but they'll take care of the rest.
It's just a theory...
5 second add (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Anuj Goyal
anuj_dot_goyal_at_gmail_com
come on google
Google frightens me (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Nothing new, and it's never 'free' (Score:2)
(http://www.openwflow.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday September 04 2004, @11:48AM)
Here in the UK, I have a deal with Bulldog (4Mb line, non-VoIP phone included) as a monthly fee. All calls to landline phones in the UK are unlimited and 'free'. On top of that, however, I have signed up with voipuser [voipuser.org] and outgoing VoIP (including calls routed to POTS) is 'free' including international calls to quite a lot of areas (Hong Kong, USA, Australia etc.). It's 'free' because incoming calls are made to premium rate numbers which subsidise the outgoing costs. I'm not sure how much longer this service might last...
I can't see what Google has to offer over this.
not really (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.misalpina.net/ghost3k/)
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
Google slogan (Score:1, Funny)
(please note that this slogan has been copyrighted and patented. Re-production without permission will lead to prosecution.)
Dark Fiber (Score:2)
(http://nojailforpot.com/)
Bah. (Score:1)
How about a dedicated google ISP? They already have a cache of damn near everything. Sign me up!
This would be the yellow pages model (Score:2)
(http://www.missouri.edu/~kingjw)
I'm baffled at people's failure to see how this would trivially make a fair amount of money.
Google already gets a ton of revenue from targetted advertising. People really do click on those ad links, and Google really does get a cut. But note first that there is a big difference between clicking on the link and actually ordering a product. Note second that the difference between calling the vendor and buying the product is smaller. I'm sure that many vendors would be much happier to have people call them, where they can pitch them more easily than any web page. But to make sure people use this a lot, you have to make it easy, and no different from making a phonecall. But then, once you've gone that far, you might as well offer the VOIP for cheap or for free and use what amounts to an interactive Yellow Pages funding model. You probably do have to cap people's calling at some amount, but if they make the service anything like gmail, it will be a nice, high number. And this won't replace cell-phones for many people. But local and long distance phone prices, which have been down to 3 cents or fewer per minute, probably just did crash all the way to zero.
imagine being bombarded with ads b4 a call (Score:1)
it may be the case that google is the least
popular in the UK, and they are doing this to boost interest.
Anotehr possibility is that in the UK google has offices, and they wish to lower telephone tax by
getting everyone to use internet lines for phone conversations.. Not to mention the potential of being wiretapped by the british government.
Just a few of the ideas I can think of..
Of course this is all speculation, I'm not british..
Re:Kind of annoying (Score:2)
(http://www.generationxyu.com/)
You've said it. (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://peter.apestaart.org/)
Yahoo is a search company.
Why shouldn't Google have it?
Re:Article text in case of slashdotting (Score:1)