http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?answer=142423
Google has recently announced details about their new voice service, Google Voice. I am reluctant to call it a VoIP service, but I believe that is probably the closest category for it. It seems to have all of the features of most VoIP services, and more. The real clincher for many is that Google Voice is free.
I will spare you from grocery listing the features. You can read about them here.
I had already planned on disconnecting my home phone shortly, but this gives me a great transition service. Sorry to those of you who love my home phone number, it’s time to say goodbye to Ma Bell and hello to Google Voice.
Huh. Looks interesting. I’d be curious as to how it will truly work, as I don’t fully understand GrandCentral. Is it basically an extension of the previous service, or is it completely different?
I am not sure, I haven’t bothered to look at Grand Central. My best guess is that Google is going to re-use Grand Central’s platform and “Googlize’ it. I just hope it is better than Android and some of the other stuff Google has put out recently. Evidently there are a few bugs, but nothing that looked like a show-stopper to me.
I used grandcentral for a while, I have a very low tolerance for dropped calls and static, and so ended up not using it. Google bought grandcentral a long time ago (2 years?), and closed registration and never did anything with it, so I figured it was dead. They’ve had a “coming soon” message on their page for a long time.
It is VOIP – I’m not sure why you are hesitating calling it that?
I now run my own VOIP server (using VOIP wholesalers, and bypassing the residential services), and I am finally happy with VOIP – I have tried a VOIP service once or twice a year for the last four or five years, and been disappointed each time. It seems to me that people’s expectations of phone quality has gotten lower, and people are so used to having issues that they assume it is their phone, and not the other guy. I think people have forgotten what phones were like 20 years ago – no static, no dropped calls, no non-completed calls.
Our bills are a little hard to track now, since we deposit $50 into the phone company every once in a while, but I think our monthly costs are somewhere on the order of $12/month, including all long distance and international calling. $5 for the incoming dial-tone, and $.02/minute to landlines in most industrialized countries. And I get all sorts of cool features, since I can program anything in Asterisk’s programming language.
With the way Google has been with developing apps, I wouldn’t be surprised if they released an app for Android or iPhone. Here’s my thought: Let’s say they release an iPhone app. If the rumors of free internet from old TV space is true, you could buy an iPod touch for a flat fee, then use the Voice app as the phone. Voila, a free-service phone.
I know it’d be more complicated than that, but still I can dream. And I’m sure there are other wi-fi enabled devices that could use this- netbooks especially- but an iPod would be a nice size…