Google Voice: Let Freedom Ring

Google Voice is the telecom invention that everyone wants, though few understand how it works. Like TiVo, digital cameras and BlackBerrys, innovations such as this take a while to be considered necessary by us regular people, and even longer for us to understand how they work.

After spending a couple hours with Google Voice CEO Craig Walker this week, and getting a crash course in telecommunications technology, I am convinced that GV, which was launched in March, will be soon embraced by all Americans.

The flexibility of the company coupled with the ingenious technology has created a business that is wonderfully free of government intervention and regulation, and it should stay that way.

For those who still don’t know, Google Voice (GV) is a free service for receiving all calls and SMS text messages. Users of the new service must keep their existing phone carriers; Google Voice functions as a forwarding number.

GV’s cool features include: free long-distance domestic calls and SMS text messages; calls that can be answered on any of your phones (home, cell, work); voice-mail transcribed and e-mailed to you; personalized voice-mail greeting by caller; free conference calls; and the ability to record calls and store them online and to switch phones during a call.

As I have written, Google Voice is my summer obsession. I spent hours and hours obsessively checking for my invite to join, for area code 202 to be released, picking the perfect phone number and linking all my phones to it.

I’m not alone. The demand to get a Google Voice phone number is so high that there is a weeks-long waiting list just for an invitation to join. The phone numbers with metropolitan area codes, which are owned by Google and offered for free, are in such demand that they are being auctioned (by their new owners) on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

Though it was previously known only to tech geeks and their followers, Google Voice exploded this summer by launching a program to take all active members of the military off the waiting list for an invite. The millions of military Google Voice users have raised both awareness of the product and demand for it.

The precursor to Google Voice is VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), which allows you to make phone calls over a broadband Internet connection. The technology has become so standard that it is explained by the FCC on its Web site.

Walker’s first company, Dialpad, was a VoIP service that was free to users; it made a profit by offering very cheap overseas calls. The biggest source of income was callers using the service between the U.S. and India, which reduced the per-minute charge from $1 to just one cent.

Other incarnations of VoIP are well-known companies like Vonage and Skype. When Walker sold Dialpad to Yahoo in 2005, it was re-branded as Yahoo Voice.

After selling Dialpad, Walker thought the VoIP market had been standardized, but he still saw a need for a new generation of phone technology. The industry, he said, had been trying to create a “unified communications space” that would bring all services under the user’s control on the Web and “make a phone number that rings on all the phones.”

To fill this void, Walker started Grand Central, a company that took VoIP and made it “intelligent.” Grand Central was bought by Google in 2007 and now is Google Voice.

Despite my enthusiasm for GV and my encouragement of friends and colleagues to also sign up, I have struggled to fully understand and use it. So I was fascinated to talk to Google exec Wesley Chan about how he brought Grand Central to the attention of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Chan said Page and Brin didn’t initially understand it either: “It took months for me to get them to put it on their phones, then to get them to use is it. But it wasn’t until they put it on their wives’ phones and they got it, that they became enthusiastic.”

Walker said that he continues to update Google Voice based on user feedback. “I ask people: What frustrates you about your phone?” he said. “What about your phone contract makes you feel you are being taken advantage of? Those are the things that I want to fix.”

As a pro-business, anti-regulation Republican, I’m pleased that government bureaucrats have not yet gotten their hands on GV.

So far, Google has kept it from government regulation and taxation by stipulating that anyone given a Google Voice number must have an existing phone number — either land line or cell phone — which is then tied directly to your GV number. The point, Walker explained, is to ensure that “phone numbers aren’t burned up just to have voice mail, which would exhaust the system.”

(Google does make exceptions to the existing-phone-line policy for the homeless, runaways and battered women. Its Project Care program, at www.projectcare.com, works with social service agencies to provide numbers so these people have access to family, friends and potential employers. The homeless, for example, could leave their number and receive callbacks through a professional-sounding voice mail, which can be checked from a payphone or borrowed phone. They can also use the service to learn the results of medical tests.)

Walker explained that other phone service providers haven’t objected thus far to Google Voice because “we aren’t competing with the carriers. We are taking an existing phone service and making it better.”

And that seems to be the case. Google Voice has been responsive to its users’ likes and dislikes. Phone numbers are personalized — users like to choose their own numbers as a reflection of themselves. But the big carriers don’t usually provide this or will give only a couple numbers to choose from.

Google, which buys the numbers from the other carriers (which get them from the government), will let you choose from any number available. I spent hours going through the options before choosing one. A lot of the fun of Google Voice is having a number that feels personal and is easy to remember.

The FCC and Capitol Hill have allowed this new technology to go unencumbered, but considering the high taxes on landlines and cell phones, I fear that Democrats will zero in on it to help pay for out of control government spending. Also, the FCC must not start regulating a technology that is quick to adapt to consumer needs in a changing market.

What makes GV vulnerable to government intervention is the lack of knowledge about it. Educating the Hill and FCC must emphasize that this technology enhances your existing phone service.

I’m using my 202 Google Voice number to call and text every day now. Let Freedom Ring!

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