John Linton .......and Google may be the 'chosen instrument of the Lord' in accomplishing that.
I think it's obvious to most people in the communications industry that VoIP has long passed the 'curiosity' stage for the 'technically adept' and has become a 'main stream' service that will now much more quickly wipe out the use of expensive and 'so 19th Century' telephone calls over 'wires'. Apart from Telstra and Optus it seems that most if not all Australian communications providers (except for the very small or the very technically inept companies) are offering their own VoIP services based on direct connections to one or more major carriers.
Certainly a small company such as Exetel's 'take up' of "naked" ADSL2 is an indication of the general market place's acceptance of VoIP as a 'main stream' telephone service and many communication providers offer the transfer of a customers PSTN number to their VoIP service at less delay and pain than some year or so ago. Hopefully Exetel will be able to do that soon and when that is available we would expect to see an immediate increase in customers using our VoIP services.
Similarly, as we near the completion of our VoIP over HSPA code development (which I have been successfully using in its basic form now for some 3 weeks) we would expect to see a major increase in our mobile customers using VoIP and making the huge savings available from that service. This will need the cost of HSPA hand sets to fall but that will happen over time as no-one will want a mobile phone that doesn't have a data capability.
This article underlines why VoIP will very quickly replace wire line telephone numbers from now onwards:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/technology/personaltech/12pogue.html?_r=2
not just because of the cost savings but because of the quantum leap in functionality.
Now, Google being the gigantic company that it is and with the vision and ability to not ony see the ten year future of communicaons but to have the will and the money to make no immediate pay back/very long term investments can afford to offer these services for 'free' and will therefore soon attract millions of users and then tens of millions of users and then.......well, they will likely wipe out 'conventional' telephone carriers before the end of the next decade.
In our small way, and with a millionth of the boldness of vision (and a billionth of the money) Exetel saw the same future as Google (and, I assume, many others) and have been slowly developing our own 'unified communications' service and have put almost all of the 'building blocks' in place:
Low cost IP, our own VoIP switches, Layer 2 HSPA/mobile connection services, FAX over VoIP, SMS over VoIP, low cost international calls over VoIP, a comprehensive, easy to use, back end user interface and several other processes currently being developed.
Once we get the PSTN number porting in place we can offer exactly the same end user services that are described in the referenced article - with none of the 'gloss' but with virtually all of the functionality - we can always put the 'gloss' on later.
I am not, for one moment, claiming that any of what we have done couldn't be duplicated in the proverbial 'blink of an eye' by any other company of our size and above - I have no doubt it could be and that it could probably be done better than we have done it........except for one thing.......the same thing that will prevent Telstra or Optus doing it in any meaningful time frame.......it isn't in their established revenue and infrastructure's investment's best interests to do it at all.
We started this development program almost 4 years ago (shortly after a new Telstra CEO under lined the stupidity of basing a business on wholesale Telstra services by immediately removing the highly competent GM of Telstra Wholesale, down grading the position and describing Telstra Wholesale customers as "parasites". It was pretty obvious that products and services based on Telstra's infrastructure or exchange access had no long term future and we had better plan a future for Exetel that provided end user services by other means.
So, as far as I can see, this latest Google initiative will not be of significant interest to any company that relies on its own wire line infrastructure, of any sort, for a significant portion of its revenues and profits - why spend a lot of money developing a service that obsoletes your current investments and produces less revenue and profit? Let alone having to compete with a company that has built a multi billion dollar company by providing 'free' services - it must be Telstra's worst nightmare.
What it may well do, or what some four years ago we saw it doing, is to allow companies like Exetel to continue to build a service offering that relies on nothing other than our own programming and engineering skills and our abilities to continue to maintain and develop supplier relationships that we have largely put in place over the past few years with companies other than Telstra or any company that relies on Telstra and therefore on Telstra's bloated pricing policies and predatory marketing 'promotions'.
My original thoughts when we began these developments was that they would work better in the EU than in Australia. However that may not still be true and in any case we have amost completed the 'product set' required to sensibly offer a 'better than Google' "unified messaging" system in Australia some time in the second half of 2009 - with a bit of luck and not too many things going wrong in these uncertain times.
It will be an interesting few years in communications - not since Motorola's brilliantly and boldly conceived, but doomed, iridium project has such a sensible leap forward in personal communications capabilities been so completely articulated by a commercial company with the ability to actually deliver on it.