Initially, our plan was to move existing service into our new building, and we made plans accordingly talking with Comcast frequently to make sure everything was moving along as our moving day approached. But, one week before our move, when we called to see when the phone service would be installed, Comcast told us that it was not going to run a new line into 350 Brannan. As we figured it, our only alternative (which may or may not be the case) is AT&T, so we started the process with Ma Bell.

This is where we entered the theater of the absurd. From our perspective, we were establishing service in our new building. Something that the AT&T Web site says should take 5-7 business days. The problem is, to AT&T we, apparently are a “win-back.” Which, for reasons that only Comcast and AT&T can justify, adds another 20 days to the process (while AT&T waits for Comcast to “release the number”). I’d like to say “it’s not my problem,” but, because in the mean time we have no phone service, it is. The alternative that the folks at AT&T are proposing is to establish new service in our new building (which means getting a new phone number) and using a feature called “Remote Call Forwarding” to have calls to old number arrive at our new place. The actual resolution is pending (thus the recommendation above to call my Google Voice number).

I used to work for the part of Pacific Telesis (now part of AT&T) that sold and helped provisionsmall business phone systems, so I thought I knew what we were getting into. I was amused at first that, after three phone calls to learn about our order status, I still had not talked to the right person. Sales didn’t know because it wasn’t a “new sale.” Service provisioning had no record of it because an order had not yet been placed. It got down to locating the single sales rep at an affiliated company who took our order. That amazed me. If I were to do all of this over again, and were gonna change numbers anyway, I’d look more seriously at Web-based provisioning through Bandwidth.com Inc.’s Phonebooth.com. It delivers the features of a small business phone system over the Internet.

In the mean time. I plan to enjoy the features of Google Voice, which makes incoming calls ring in multiple places, transcribes voicemail, let’s me send and receive SMS text messages from my computer and originate phone calls when Gmail is running on my browser. Our neighbors in the new building are letting us “share” their WiFi, while we wait to learn more about the progress of our installation.

Life’s good.

Here’s the blog post regarding the offer, which also includes this video:

The impact on the IP-telephony landscape will be negligible and subtle. The “portability” service is being offered on a limited basis. It applies only to wireless numbers (not, for instance, a business’s landline). What’s more It carries a charge of $20 for each ported number and requires the wireless subscriber to “cancel” his or her existing contract (which often involves an “Early Termination Fee” in the $150 range).

I’ve been urging folks to petition for number portability since June 2009. My thought was that it would create a new use case for mobile business people to consolidate their communications needs around a single phone number. But I didn’t think this would be the response. It is not destined to attract a lot of new users because it makes it too complicated and expensive to switch.

Meanwhile, Google is taking an approach to telephony that should marginalize telephone numbers, especially for owners of smart phones. Its developers have done a great job of embedding Google Voice-based talk paths into a number of its popular online properties – especially GMail and the Google app for mobile (including Rim, iOS and Android). Thus they make it possible for mobile subscribers to personalize their Google Voice experience and make it a preferred way to communicate from desktops and smartphones.

As I described back in 2009, Google took pains to claim an inventory of phone numbers, but it makes them largely transparent to the user. These days, users commonly originate calls by clicking on a entry in their contact lists or simply returning a missed or “recent” call. Likewise, the “Call Phone” feature of Gmail leverages the contact list embedded in its popular email service, but it’s introduction did not siphon traffic from alternative IP-telephony services, like Skype.

The impact of BYON (Bring Your Own Number) will be minimal to begin with and will have a “time release” quality to it as people hold off until their wireless contracts have expired. It will appeal to a small subset of individuals who have grown attached to their existing wireless numbers and want to make it their single-number-for-life while availing themselves of Google Voice’s many cool features, which include voicemail transcription in a single “in-box” (with text messages), PC-based text origination, inexpensive long distance and international calling from PCs and mobile phones. In the long run, it will be the list of features, not the ability to port an existing number, that will attract new users.

After installing the widgets, Android owners will have single-click access to the full Google Voice (much the same as when iPhone owners create an icon to be displayed “on the glass”). The new Android widgets provide control of Google Voice functions without invoking an app or opening a browser. They can compose a text message, change their dialing preferences “on-the-fly” and change status (to “Do Not Disturb”, for example).

All of this is setting the stage for Android owners to discover how to take more initiative with their Google Voice features. Based on this post, such actions can be downright contagious. Its author figured out how to use Google Voice Actions (speech-to-text conversion) to transform an Android phone into an entry point for text messages, calendar entries (for Google Calendar, update Twitter and Facebook or leave reminders on “Remember the Milk.” In other words, the foundation is laid for each of us to build our own speech-enabled mashup.

Instead, eight months and a Skype IPO later, the “Call Phone” feature dramatizes the truly disruptive nature of Google’s telephony strategy. It’s no surprise at all that the service reached the million call milestone in less than 24 hours. That is just a fraction of the overall call volume on public networks and we all know how quickly people discover “free” ways to carry out communications that cost a nominal fee from alternative service providers (Directory Assistance served as the crash test dummy for the fee-to-free migration pattern).

If Gmail, Google Voice and Google Chat users stay true to form on the Google’s information freeway, we will see steady migration from alternative services like Skype Out and the numerous calling card services that charge pennies per minute. The steady improvement of the “Google App” on mobile phones and integration of Google’s library of applications with Android, Chrome and HTML5 program environments will further lower the barriers for users to stay inside Google while originating (within the confines of North America, at least).

Meanwhile, the steady improvement of voice control carries on, It makes the notion of free, mobile, speech-based search, find and communicate exclusively from Google (perhaps with an assist from Verizon Wireless) a formidable reality.

The Google Voice landing page lists the primary features as “One Number” (for all your phones), “Online Voicemail” (that behaves like email) and “Cheap calls” (which are actually free in the U.S. and Canada). Yet I think that those features are listed in reverse order of importance to folks that are generally unacquainted with VoIP services, call management and the joys of automated transcription of voicemail messages.

Of the dozen of so people I’ve invited to use Google Voice, those of us who use it to make free calls to Canada are the happiest. Most of the others have either not used the service at all, or occasionally give out their “Google Voice” number to people with whom they are carrying out business. After a few months of using the service, most don’t know their Google Voice number by heart (I know I don’t). Recent invitees have been able to pick a vanity number (like ones that include their names) that they find easier memorize.

With cheap calling as the primary reason people register for Google Voice, it is on a collision course with Skype when it comes to growing the user base for enhanced VoIP services. Indeed, it is probably not a coincidence that Skype chose this day to open its waiting list for “Skypekit” a library of software and API’s to help application developers integrate Skype into their offerings for all sorts of devices and mobile platforms.

Stepped up activity surrounding Google Voice and Skype will lead other “cloud based” telephony platforms (like IfByPhone and Bandwidth.com, among others) to step up their game. Thus the second half of 2010 should emerge as a golden age for phone apps. With newbies entering the market both as customers and as application developers, the best counsel I can provide is to say (as I have in the past), “The difference between a brilliant phone app and a stupid phone trick is the attention paid to the quality of the user experience.”

Beside, the ability to originate a phone call (or even a video chat) from “inside” an email client is a candidate for the “most demo’d” feature for the “Unified Communications” suites from Microsoft, IBM, Avaya and a handful of others. According to the “Google Operating System” blog post, Gmail users will be able to click on a “phone icon” which will open a “chat client” that includes a dialpad for originating a phone call. It will also illustrate the credit balance a Google Voice user has on his or her account. For those of us who have used Google Voice on an iPhone, the similarities sound pretty striking. You are presented with a landing page that features the keypad, but also provides one-touch access to Buzz, Gmail and “more”. The keypad captures digits and then initiates a a call that that ultimately goes over the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). It’s pretty slick, and ultimately transparent to the user (except that a dialog box appears to say that it is originating a call from some third party’s number.

These are by-no-means “stupid phone tricks.” Google is making its point that “voice services” are an integral part of Web-based offerings and that the Web extends from desktops to smartphones to POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) on a natural, as needed, basis.

As the the video’s narrator admits, sometimes the transcriptions are not so accurate but, in certain cases, “they are still better than nothing.” That, in a nutshell, captures the notion of “satisficing” which I discussed in this blog post. At this point in the technology’s development, it’s important to note when “good enough” is good enough.

Yet that hasn’t stopped a significant number of industry luminaries from declaring the service a “#failure”. For instance, the video embedded in this article by Janko Roettgers at GigoOm’s jkOntheRunfrom showcases what he calls “auto-captioning gone wrong”.

You can detect the pattern here. Google makes public a feature that has been percolating within the confines of its cloud for a number of years. It shows up as “beta” or a product of its “labs” or simply as a button that can be invoked in one of its highly-trafficked properties – like Gmail or Google Apps. Early reviews are a mixture of delight, shock, awe and ridicule. All feedback is encouraged and ultimately employed to refine and adapt the service for general consumption… or relegate it back to cloud-based oblivion.

I see auto-captioning, as well as translation and timing, as yet another “speechable moment,” meaning that it is an instance where the resources employed for a new set of core services, like speech recognition for the purpose of transcription or translation, are deployed as part of a broader set of services. I coined the term while discussing enhancements to Vlingo’s iPhone app in this post on Internet2Go.net.

Even though I don’t subscribe to the belief that “all publicity is good publicity”, I do believe that exposing the public to both the good and bad instances of transcription and translation is an important part of setting realistic expectations for the technology. That provides prospective users with the power to decide how they want to use (or “game”) the service and determine whether it is “good enough” for them.

As reported by Schonfeld, there are some neat call handling tricks going on behind the scenes to enable a mobile app to initiate a call through the browser. But the end users will find a familiar “inbox” complete with SMS, transcribed voice messages (such as they are) and call records for phone calls received or originated using their assigned Google Voice number.

“Cord-cutting” is a major trend underlying Recombinant Communications. Google is joined by Ribbit Mobile, Truphone, fring and even the mother of all VoIP providers Skype are evolving and extending their range and product depth over smartphones. In making the move, each is demonstrating how far we have moved beyond inexpensive international calling and single number service.

Advisories are available to registered users only.

For more information on becoming an Opus Research client, please contact Pete Headrick (pheadrick@opusresearch.net).

In the name of reducing the time it takes to navigate the Web, Google is now operating its own version of what it calls “the Internet’s phonebook.” Instead of leaving navigational matters to chance, or at least to a version of the DNS housed in your ISP’s (Internet Service Providers’s) cloud, Google is now providing instructions for changing your personal computer’s settings to do its lookups at 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4. The full set of instructions can be read here.

The change is simple and belies the huge change that it is proposing to foster in the name of speeding up individual Web browsers. Google’s post would have us believe that it has simple substituted its “faster” phonebook for a slower alternative. In point of fact, a DNS is both the phonebook and the switchboard (routing resource). The paranoid among us see operation of a DNS as Google’s way of capturing more metadata surrounding the activities of Web browsers. On the benign side of things, such information can be fed into its vaunted algorithm to help refine its delivery of search results. On the flip side, such information can be blended with search histories and other Web-based activity and be used to support optimization of delivery of advertisements that accompany search results.

As a self-described “telco head”, I look at a combination of network-based directory and routing engine as a IP-telephony “switch”. If enterprise and personal users point their softphones or browser-based telephony clients at Google’s “public DNS”, they are, in effect making Google their telephone company. The ISP becomes the dreaded “fat, dumb pipe” that it has been making great efforts to avoid and, rather than the intelligence moving to “the edge”, meaning at the control of the general public, it moves into Google’s cloud where it can be more closely linked to other resources, run-times and routines.

This is yet another case where the general public is called upon to accept the fact that Google’s guiding principle, “don’t be evil”, is in full force. In this case, the issues are more complex and less black-or-white. I may want to have faster browsing, but not want to elect to have Google handle all my look-up and routing activities. Applying the same logic to Google Voice, I may want to have fast routing of voice communications, but not elect to have Google be my next-gen phone company.