An editorial in the VOIP News this week postulated that Google Voice might be in the position to eliminate overseas cell phone calling once the service is launched this spring. Why? Because GV does two things that neither Skype nor mobile phones can do by themselves: with a Google Voice dialer on your smartphone, you can dial out of the country cheaply, and you can do it without a computer.
The article describes how the smartphone-based GV dialers work:
Users typically choose a name from the built-in address book, or dial manually. The dialer first instructs the handset to dial a VoIP gateway, then tells the gateway what number to call. It makes VoIP dialing as easy as regular cellular calling. Users pay for cellular airtime plus the cheap VoIP rates if the call is international.
In other words, Google Voice will be able to “spoof” the people you call into thinking that your mobile phone is using your Google Voice phone number. That means that when they call you back, they won’t try to use your real mobile number–that’d cause confusion. The whole process will stay within GV service, which like Skype will charge pennies on the dollar for overseas calls. All you’ll need is your 3G data connection or WiFi.
Of course, there’s a complication: the only dialers available right now, GVMobile and VoiceCentral, are for iPhone only. But more are coming, and for other platforms as well. (Some kind of baked-in functionality for Google Android phones seems like a logical next step, too.)
And with new radio spectrum opening up for all kinds of uses–including mobile broadband–there’s no telling where the service could go from there. If Google executes its Voice strategy to its logical end, they could end up with both a smartphone and a service that don’t rely on the big four domestic carriers at all. That would mean no more 2-year cell contracts or $100-a-month service plans.
And wouldn’t that be nice?
