Is Google the Future of Telecom?

Google (News - Alert) is one of those remarkable companies that, if their activities were described to you 15 years ago, you’d never believe such a company could ever exist outside the realm of science fiction & fantasy novels. Even the fabulous cafeteria of their New York offices caused a sensation when it opened in 2006.

Like President Obama, Google is “spreading the wealth around,” technologically speaking. First they got everyone’s attention by revolutionizing the mobile phone world with the open source-based Android (News - Alert), and now they’ve taken one of their acquisitions, GrandCentral, and put it on steroids in the form of Google Voice (www.google.com/voice). Former GrandCentral (and soon to be Google Voice) users received an email reading: “Once you choose to upgrade, you will automatically get all the great new features (transcription, SMS, conference calling, cheap international calling, Goog411 integration, etc.), and new voicemail and SMS messages will begin appearing in your Google Voice inbox.”

Just listing and describing all of Google Voice’s capabilities would take a page. Perhaps the first and most important feature is Google number, which provides you with one number for all your calls and SMS. You also get Call Screening (announce and screen callers), “Listen in” (listen before taking a call), Phone Routing (phones ring based on who calls), Forwarding Phones (adds phones and decide which ring), Google voicemail (check online or from your phone), Voicemail transcripts (voicemail-to-text), share voicemail, Conference Calling, Call Record, Call Switch (switch phones during a call), view your inbox from your mobile, GOOG-411 (directory assistance), and you can initiate calls with the one-click “Quick Call” feature. Similarly, users can click to send SMS messages from the homepage. The features just go on and on.

Interestingly, you get mobile access to Google Voice, which elevates the platform to that of today’s more advanced unified communications systems and services.

It’s been said that Google Voice has so perturbed Telecom Equipment Manufacturers (TEMs), that they’re scrambling to offer equipment that will enable network operators to deploy services that parallel those of Google Voice. For example, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) (probably coincidentally) unveiled its Release 2.1 of its 5155 Rich Communications Manager, a web portal-based platform that, like Google Voice, integrates voicemail, SMS, email, etc. and allows them to be accessible from various wireline and wireless devices.

Ultimately, we’re sure Google will evolve its services to become more business-like and will be able to track, analyze and archive all forms of communication that enter and exit its platform. Best of all, applications are starting to appear for Google Voice. Eventually such suites begin to take on the flavor of contact center/CRM applications, and end up communications-enabling most business processes. Google’s highly secure Chrome browser will doubtless play a future role in all of this, along with Google Gears that enable web applications to run offline. Eventually, one would expect that Google’s ocean of functionality will become free-floating, reproducible on iPhone, BlackBerry, S60, etc., as well as the Android-based T-Mobile (News - Alert) G1 (or some other future “Gphone”). Already Google’s Voice Search feature has been ported to run on BlackBerrys, just as it does on the iPhone and Android, wherein you hold down the Talk button and speak search terms into the phone (it also supports Google’s My Locations, which that displays search results based on your location as reckoned by your smartphone’s GPS, WiFi (News - Alert), and cellular triangulation data).

In short, Google may ultimately offer a complete, seamless communications environment that can serve large and small businesses as well as it does consumers. It could well bring about the kind of communications revolution that years ago we naively associated with the emergence of such VoIP telco look-alikes as Vonage (News - Alert), all of which today appear quite conservative, even pedestrian in nature. IT

Richard Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC (News - Alert)’s IP Communications Group.

» Internet Telephony Magazine Table of Contents