Top Stories of 2009: Google gets serious about VoIP

In some ways, the story of Google getting into VoIP [1] isn't quite finished. The moves the Internet company has made are intriguing, but we haven't seen their end product yet.

The roots of Google's VoIP play began in 2007 when it acquired Grand Central, a Unified Communicaitons (UC) company. When the acquisition was completed, Grand Central disappeared into Google and eventually re-emerged in March [2] as Google Voice with the promise of offerings like transcripts of one's voicemail, and archive and search of all SMS text messages you send and receive, plus easy access to Goog-400 directory assistance and the ability to make low-priced international calls. FierceVoIP wasn't too excited [3] about this development at the time.

In May, Google reserved one million phone numbers with Level 3 causing speculation that a public launch [4] of its Google Voice service was imminent, but Google Voice Product Manager Craig Walker dispelled those rumors via Twitter [5]. Finally in June, Google did open the service to the public by emailing people who had expressed interest and giving them invites [6]. Right after that, Google launched Voice for mobile, starting with the Android platform and Blackberry [7]. In July Google submitted its Google Voice app for the iPhone, but it was pulled from the iPhone App Store [8] because Voice overlapped with a number of features already offered by the iPhone. This move turned heads and the FCC probed the app removal looking for anti-trust violations. [9]

Meanwhile Google added pseudo-mobile number portability to forward cellphone voicemails to Voice. [10] Google also got into some trouble for enabling a traffic-pumping workaround on Voice. [11] Google Voice now has over 1.4M users [12] and partners with Level 3 Communications, Global Crossing, Broadvox Communications, Bandwidth.com, Pac-West Telecomm, iBasis and Neustar. One of the biggest moves towards a becoming a real VoIP competitor came when Google bought Gizmo5 which was being looked at by Skype [13]. The Internet VoIP provider competes with Skype with peer-to-peer and low-cost VoIP calls and would now allow Voice to place calls over the Internet and from mobile devices with SIP calling. Later it was announced that Gizmo5 was migrating user PSTN numbers [14] to Voice and that Google was shutting down GrandCentral at the end of the year. [15]

The final bit of news that may or not be true was the theory that Google would be launching a VoIP-based phone [16]. Although the latest Google phone to surface looks like a regular wireless Android-based phone, there is still hope that a data-only Google Voice phone is in our future.