Many have wondered Google's end game when it comes to their Google Voice (GV) venture, and how will it integrate itself with all of their many other services, such as the Android mobile phone platform, Google Docs, Gmail, their Google Apps suite, and finally their core business, search. I myself have contimplated this very subject many times, all with different conclusions spawning from what new product or service was released that given week.
However, recently my thoughts have been focused more on GV and how it will incorporate and embed itself further into their mobile phone platform all in the next few years. The instigation of this theory was brought upon by several factors; including those of comments by executives by several of the major cell phone carriers regarding the disolution of voice minute plans, the recent purchase by Google of Internet based phone service provider Gizmo5, Google's further integration of the GV application not only on their own mobile platform, but also every other mobile device and even the web. All of these tea leaves lead to one given conclusion. Google plans to be one of the first major Voice over Internet Providers (VoIP) to help consumers do away with their cell phone voice minutes plans.
Within the next 2-5 years, cell phone carriers will transtion the majority of its customers to strictly data based plans, doing away with numerical based voice minute pricing. These variable plans will be replaced with varibale data plan pricing, which currently is a flat fee with a few carriers, such as AT&T, with their $30 a month "unlimited" data plan for the iPhone. Basically, consumers will not have to worry anymore about how many minutes they use on their cell phone, but instead, how much data, or Internet traffic they are utilizing between their phone calls, email reading, facebook posting, and overall Internet usage on their mobile device.
It is not by chance that Google has entered the voice market at this time. Specifically, cell phone carriers are currently releasing the infrastrcuture to support Internet speeds faster than the standard home Internet connection, like DSL and cable, but to mobile phones and devices. Internet data over a cell phone tower will soon become faster to your mobile device than the average American connecting to their Wifi network at home or at Starbucks. By accomplishing this great feat of providing massive broadband speeds over the cell phone network, VoIP service providers, such as Vonage, RingCentral, and Google Voice will soon be able to offer unlimited voice plans over mobile phone data networks, bringing down the overall cost of connecting a voice call. In a nutshell, voice calls have morphed over the ages from fixed circuits which need to be switched manually by local operators, to Internet based data, traveling around the world in milliseconds. Voice calls will soon be stereo quality and even accompanied with high resolution video, all through your mobile device.
How far off is this technology? Well, it depends on Verizon, Sprint, and AT&T, and their promises to roll out their WiMax and LTE networks nationwide before the end of this year. Once these networks are rolled out, VoIP providers will be able to provide these same great services over mobile phones, and not use the consumers voice minute plan.
Text (txt) message plans will also be a thing of the past in the very near future, as services such as GV offer free txt messaging via the Internet and data based mobile plans.
In summary, the rapidly increasing speed of data over cell phone towers is bringing with it a massive change in how the consumer pays and monitors their cell phone bill. Very quickly the consumer will need to learn the difference between a megabyte of data, and how it equates to ten minutes of a phone conversation to a friend anywhere in the world, as the cell phone company's will not be tracking their minutes, but yet their data usage.
12:14 PM
G-off
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