Google Phone: Will Second Time be the Charm?

Remember Zer01 Mobile, the mobile virtual network enabler, which says it "is the first mobile virtual enabler company to offer true mobile voice over IP services at a carrier level?" I don't mean "remember" as in, "they're gone," but only in the sense that you might not have heard quite so much about them since they switched business plans and became an MVNE rather than a retail provider.

At their original unveiling, some of us thought the most interesting angle about Zer01 was the way it went about providing voice services, at that time not a classic mobile virtual network operator,. but as something else. Up to this point, MVNOs essentially have bought capacity from some underlying carrier and then rebranded and resold those services under their own names.

Zer01 Mobile did something different. It leveraged intercarrier connection rights to essentially roam on other 3G GSM networks. It's the same sort of business arrangements mobile providers create when they want their own subscribers to use other networks where the home network does not actually have infrastructure.

By such mechanisms, Zer01 Mobile essentially was able to create a VoIP offering using the data connection only, with no need to buy wholesale voice minutes.

At the time Zer01 Mobile launched, at least some of us found the approach intriguing, though we were not then, and probably are not now, convinced the company would be first to really make a wild success of the approach.

So that's where a new Google-branded phone might just make sense. Nobody knows now whether Google is, or is not, readying its own branded phone. But one thing is clear: Google posseses the carrier interconnection rights it would need to create such an IP-only phone that relies completely on 3G bandwidth for all services.

So Google might not be frontally competing with any other service providers, or necessarily with any other mobile phone or smartphone providers, in the sense that it could bring to market a "data only" device that relies solely on the data connection to handle all voice functions.

There might be occasional quality issues, for the same reason there might occasionally be quality issues for any data services running on any mobile network that is at peak load. Over time those issues can be resolved.

Ability to prioritize voice packets clearly would help, but it is not clear whether that will be permissible, going forwad, because of possible network neutrality rules. If ever there was a good reason for prioritizing bits, maintaining the quality of voice conversations on an all-data network would be one of the best.

It's all conjecture at this point: the Google phone, the method of providing service and voice prioritization. But there is a possibility that something Zer01 Mobile cleverly devised might succeed in a very-big way if Google were to do anything similar.