Google Voice "Soon" for Europe

Google is currently testing its telephony service Google Voice in Europe, ahead of a planned launch outside the United States for the first time, the company’s European Director of Business Development, Jens Redmer says.

Redmer couldn’t give a precise launch date. He said that the launch didn't hinge on engineering issues, but rather regulatory issues.

Google phone call from Gmail in the UK from The Next Web on Vimeo.

Google confirms that if you’re outside the United States and you set your language to U.S. English in Gmail, this feature might become available to you.


When Google announced it was rolling out the ability to make Google Voice calls within Gmail, there was the slight caveat that users outside the USA couldn’t use it.

Google Voice being tested in Europe ahead of international launch

Google Voice Sprint Integration Goes Live April 26, 2011

Some Google users already have the feature activated.

There are two ways to enable the integrated service:

1. Option 1: Keep your Sprint number (all the benefits of porting without the need to). In this case, your Sprint number becomes your Google Voice number so that when people call your Sprint mobile number, it rings all the phones you want.

How to enable this: click on the "change/port" link next to your GV # in the settings page, choose the option to use your existing number, enter your Sprint number and select the Sprint option.

2. Option 2: Replace your Sprint number with your Google Voice number (all the benefits of the app without the need for one). In this case, all calls made from your Sprint phone will display your Google Voice # natively (same for SMS).

Google Introduces Number Portability

Service providers now have to worry about Google Voice being the recipient of ported phone numbers. So where numbers once ported from landline to mobile, now they can further port directly to Google Voice.

Google Voice Podcast

Jim Burton, Dave Michels,Samantha Kane, Jon Arnold, Michael Finneran, Art Rosenberg, Don Van Doren, and Steve Leaden talk about the implications Google Voice poses for the broader unified communications space. 
 listen here

What's Next for Google Voice?

 What's coming next for Google Voice? Possibly voice-activated text message creation and handling. Maybe application programming interfaces so third party developers can embed Google Voice in their applications.

Better transcription of audio into text is possible. Those of you who have used transcription in Google Voice might say it is required.

Voice-controlled actions might also be ported to platforms other than Android.

Google Voice Now Open to Everyone in the U.S.

Google Voice to Integrate with Gmail

Google apparently is testing a new feature that makes Gmail chat more useful: users are able to make and receive Google Voice calls from inside the Gmail application, as they would using Skype on a PC.

A new phone icon opens a Gmail chat window with a dialpad, an option to find contacts, a credit balance and a call button.

Google Voice to Integrate with Gmail as a VoIP Service:

Send SMS Messages to Multiple Recipients Using Google Voice

One of the differences between email and texting, aside from the SMS character limitation, is sending a single message to multiple recipients. Google Voice now allows such multi-party text messages.

Users just click on the SMS button at the top of their Google Voice inboxes, enter names or numbers (separated by commas) in the "To" field, write messages and click "send."

Replies from each recipient are threaded into separate conversations, so users can keep track of them in their Google Voice inboxes. To prevent spam, Google sets a maximum of five recipients per message.

It's useful.

Google Voice Extension for Chrome Browser Now Live

Google Voice now is available as an extension for the Chrome browser. Adding the extension
adds click-to-ccall functionality to Web pages. If there is a phone number on a Web page, or your online address book, it will now have a hyperlink. Click it and Google will open a pop-up window asking which phone you want to use to set up the call, and does.

Google Voice, you will recall, is not an IP telephony or VoIP application n the sense that Skype or Vonage are. Basically, Google uses the Web to set up and complete calls using your existing mobile or fixed connections, adding some interesting call management features.

The extension also adds a small icon in the upper right of the browser. You can type in a name or phone number and call or send a text message from the browser, and read recent text messages and transcribed voicemails (Google automatically transcribes voicemails, usually not all that well).

Many observers think Google ultimately will add softphone functionality, allowing Google Voice to function as an VoIP client.

What Business is Google In?

Looking back from where we are, and recalling the vigorous debates analysts and observers once had about "whether Google wants to be a phone company," it now appears the original question has no simple, unambiguous answer.

Does Google want to be a regulated common carrier providing communication services to consumers and businesses? No. Does Google want to be a provider of Web-enabled IP telephony services? Yes. That's what Google Voice does.

Does Google want to be a "Skype-like" provider of international calling services? Perhaps it was not originally thinking it wanted to do so, but Google Voice now supports for-fee global calling from whatever handsets Google Voice users wish to employ.

Does Google want to be a facilities-based wireless services provider? No, but it has an investment stake in Clearwire. Does Google want to be a mobile phone manufacturer? No, but it is increasingly partnering with others, including hardware and service provider partners, to create new applications and business practices within the mobile industry, planning to introduce the "Nexus One," a Google-branded open and unlocked GSM phone, in 2010.

The point is that there is no unambiguous answer to any of these questions. Google slowly has been adding new roles in the communication ecosystem, but primarily to increase its core business model of indexing information and creating advertising revenue streams around the ways people use information.

To "answer" the decades-old question about whether an "ad-supported" telephony model can be created, again we are left with an ambiguous answer. The consumer voice apps Google provides are partially supported by end user fees, while the business-focused "Google Apps" productivity suite primarily is supported by user fees.

It remains unclear whether any sustainable "telephony services" business model can be 100-percent ad supported. But it seems likely such an effort can be partially ad supported, just as cable TV service provider evenues are partially ad supported.

So here's the next question: Will Google Voice, still in private beta, be configured as a small business service, much as Google Apps comes in both a consumer version and an enhanced business version? Michael Arrington at TechCrunch thinks that will happen.

"From what we've heard, Google is very seriously planning to add a version of the Google Voice product to its Apps suite of applications for businesses," says Arrington.

So far it sounds as though the service will be most applicable to the very-small business setting, as the likely deployment will feature a single inbound line and then mapped extensions that will redirect calls to a home business line, mobile or VoIP device.

The key here is management of the single trunk line. To keep the single trunk line available, Google Voice would have to connect an inbound call to the virtual extension, creating a direct connection between the caller number and the virtual extension, and then release the trunk line.

The same thing would have to be done for outbound calls, allowing the Gooble Voice virtual number to do the outbound dialing, setting up the connection between two physical phone devices, and then releasing the Google Voice trunk.

If that isn't done, there will be danger of high "line is busy" blocking.

Still, one would guess that the inevitable question--does Google want to be a provider of communications services to small business--likewise will wind up being only ambiguously answerable. The only unambiguous observation is that Google now is well entrenched in the mobile, communications, application, advertising, IP communications spaces.

It is part of the ecosystem, but uncomfortably (for other ecosystem partners) unconfined to one role in the full ecosystem. Perhaps a better way of phrasing the question is: "Does Google want to make itself the center of a new ecosystem?". There's likely a single answer to that question.


Google started out as a search engine, and have since expanded, through product development and acquisitions, to include services in every link of the information chain, says Jay Neeley, a Web strategy consultant. So one way of looking at how Google might see itself is that it operates in core parts of the information ecosystem.

As part of its activities in the "Internal Information Creation" segment, Google hosts or enables the creation of content.
But Google also is heavily involved in the "External Information Creation" segment, indexing information it has not created.

In the "Information Usage" segment, Google facilitates ways to share, edit, talk about, use, remix, and do all kinds of other things with information. In the "Information Reception" segment, Google offers a variety of ways for users to access and keep track of information.

"Information Aggregation" is another part of what Google does, culling information by popularity or usefulness and
making that information available in other ways, such as in Google Maps. "Information Analysis" is part of the analytics portion of the information business.

It just so happens that to extend its information business, Google might want to do lots of other things that impinge on other existing businesses in the communications, entertainment, applications, software, media and hardware spaces.

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.

What Google Could Do with Gizmo5

Google has bought Gizmo5, an IP communications firm with a deep understanding of Session Initiation Protocol, which has been adopted globally by communications firms as the protocol for handling IP-based communications including voice, video and messaging.

That of course means Google could do lots of things. The "grabber" headline might be that Google now wants to "out-Skype" Skype by introducing a feature-rich calling service able to communicate with standard telephone devices, but also allow all sorts of rich and affordable features for IP-enabled devices on broadband networks.

According to that logic, Google might be readying a disruptive global calling service aimed either at Skype or at the global tier one telecom providers, either mobile or fixed.

But Google has other options as well. Those options might make as compelling headlines, but could make virtually any Google application more compelling.

In any of a number of scenarios, Google might be looking at anything but becoming a challenger to traditional telecom services, and maybe not even a direct challenger to Skype. The value of SIP is that it can "communications enable" virtually any Web application.

It could add voice communications, video or audio conferencing, messaging or other message and call handling features to any other Web-based application. As eBay once described the upside when buying Skype, voice communications could be added to any potential eBay transaction.

That didn't materialize, but the point is that SIP will be easy to integrate with Web applications and global IP communications in the way communications service providers are used to providing it.

In the perhaps more likely scenario, Google would work to embed rich communications into any number of its applications. In its mobile search efforts, Google would be able to create a location-based search experience that included one click calling, for example.

The same would be true for its mapping and turn-by-turn communications feature for Android mobile devices.

SIP could help Google embed live communcations links in Google Docs, or Wave, allowing real time communications to be a simple one-click feature of collaboration.

The point is that Google likely is not looking at anything so pedestrian as a "Skype killer." Embedded voice, messaging and video communications might be a very attractive feature for any advertiser using any Google application as an ad venue.

In any of these scenarios, Gizmo5 brings Google, and Google Voice, the ability to embed communications in nearly every application. It is the mass market equivalent of "communications enabled business processes" in the enterprise space.

Sure, Google might leverage the Skype style communications to enhance Google Voice. But it seems unlikely to me to stop there. As VoIP proponents always have argued, the real value lies not in free or cheap calling, but in changing the nature of the communications experience. In all likelihood, Google is thinking that way.

Mobile VoIP is Inevitable, Yankee Group Says

Flat-rate data pricing has made mobile VoIP applications inevitable, and over time, all U.S. carriers will end up allowing them, says Yankee Group analyst Carl Howe. That, in turn, is going to have profound impact on the mobile service provider business model, as voice now is the key revenue driver.

Some of the effects are easy to predict. International call traffic will migrate to VoIP. In the U.S. market, for example, domestic voice calling minutes are cheap, but international rates are fairly high.

On the other hand, mobile VoIP also will shift international traffic from the landline networks (including use of VoIP from fixed broadband connections) to the mobile network.

Less easily quantified is the boost mobile VoIP will give to purchase and use of specific handsets, and the emergence of specific mobile VoIP user segments. For example, devices with front-facing cameras potentially can become the foundation for mobile videoconferencing services and applications.

If you think of BlackBerries as "email" centric phones, and iPhones as "mobile Web" phones, while other devices are "social networking" or "navigation" oriented, you can see where the niches might be.

It is conceivable that "flat-rate data plan caps will tighten," says Howe. Mobile service providers might try to avoid a wholesale collapse of voice revenue by trying to manage network capacity through through more-stringent bandwidth caps.

The operative word in that sentence, however, is “trying,” says Howe. Data caps and over-cap pricing are likely to receive intense regulatory scrutiny to ensure that operators aren’t gouging customers in an attempt to replace lost voice revenues.

The other big unknown is whether service providers will be allowed to create optional "voice optimized" or "conferencing optimized" service plans for users that want priority handling of their own conferencing and voice bits, or "video optimized" plans for users who deem video apps to be key.

In a sign of things to come, Verizon Wireless and AT&T now allow use of mobile VoIP. Google's Android phones running on Verizon's network have VoIP applications available on them.

AT&T also now allows use of the Skype VoIP application on AT&T’s 3G network and iPhones. Vonage and iBasis, among others, also support mobile VoIP calling.

The VoIP trend actually only accelerates an on-going trend. U.S. mobile service provider monthly voice revenue per subscriber has declined from an average of $58 in 2000 to less than $35 in 2009. VoIP might accelerate that process, but is not singlehandedly causing it.

Data plan revenue is the obvious replacement revenue source. And with more application stores offering mobile VoIP clients, it will be hard to stop users from substituting VoIP for traditional calling. Of course, mobile providers have options.

They might not want to do so, but one way to prevent substantial migration to VoIP calling is simply to lower prices for tradtional calling, especially under conditions where voice is carried on one network, and data on a separate network. Part of the overall equation is the additional load mobile VoIP calling will place on 3G networks. In a sense, providing incentives for users to use the voice network for voice offloads traffis from the 3G networks.

Ease of use will emerge as a key issue as more mobile VoIP clients are made available. For many users, domestic calling is cheap enough that mobile VoIP will not provide much advantage, as compelling as international VoIP will be. Anything other than the normal process people now use to dial calls will create huge barriers to domestic VoIP usage.

Call quality also will be an issue. People are used to mobile voice call quality being less than landline. They are used to VoIP calls being equivalent to mobile call quality. But quality less than mobile will create barriers to usage.

On the other hand, use of high-quality codecs will be an incentive to use of mobile VoIP. Anybody who has used Skype high-definition codecs might have new incentives to use VoIP calling services that offer such experiences. Adoption barriers exist here, as both ends of a circuit must be equipped with high-performance codecs to maximize the experience.

The other unknown is the impact of devices able to support multitasking and integrate data services such as instant messaging and presence functions with voice sessions.

Carriers might want to ationalize data and voice pricing, says Howe. A $30 per month data plan capped at 5 GB a month allows your typical 24 Kbps codec VoIP user to talk for nearly 21,000 minutes. That makes the $60 AT&T charges for 900 voice minutes a month look pretty expensive, says Howe.

Operators should do the math on tariffs they charge and adjust rates so VoIP arbitrage becomes less attractive.

Service providers also should build their own mobile VoIP apps, optimized to work with 3G networks as well as Wi-Fi and 4G networks they also may own. That of course assumes such optimization will remain legal once the Federal Communications Commission finishes its rulemaking on network neutrality.

Google Voice has 1.4 Million Users

Google Voice has 1.419 million users, some 570,000 of which use it seven days a week, Google says, in information Google apparently released accidentally in a letter to the Federal Communications Commission and discovered by Business Week before the information was discovered and removed.

The early version of the documents also suggested Google has plans to take Google Voice global. Google apparently said it already has signed contracts with a number of international service providers.

Google Blocks Calls to About 100 High-Cost Telephone Numbers

Google says that although it still blocks use of Google Voice to terminate calls to fewer than 100 U.S. telephone numbers with unusually high termination cost, it still does so. Earlier, Google Voice had been blocking calls to thousands of numbers in some exchanges.

In a letter to the Federal Communications Commission, Google says a June 2009 study it conducted found that the top 10 U.S. telephone prefixes Google Voice was terminating accounted for 1.1 percent of its monthly call volume, about 161 times the expected volume for a "typical" prefix. That 1.1 percent of calls also accounted for 26.2 percent of its monthly termination costs.

Google says terminating those calls costs as much as 39 cents a minute. Google therefore blocked Google Voice calls to less than 100 U.S. telephone numbers, based on that study.

The difference is that where Google had before only been able to block calls to prefixes, it now can block specific telephone numbers with highly asymmetric traffic typical of free conference call services, for example, which never place outbound calls, but simply receive them.