Google Voice discovered allowing pure VoIP calls
Google Voice users learned late Monday that the service now has a way of making purely Internet-based phone calls. Making a SIP call with a “sip:” prefix, the Google Voice phone number and @sip.voice.google.com skips the conventional phone network entirely, saving users cellphone minutes. Disruptive Telephony tested it and found that a call worked “great.”
Phi Beta Iota: This is in our view NSA's wet dream (they're tight with Google, which started with CIA funding, taking over Alta Vista when HP lost its mind, and stealing Yahoo's search engine). We're moving toward everyone having an IP address instead of a telephone number, and absent the Freedom Box and other non-Google options Google is well on its way to owning the 10% of the data and voice that uses the cloud. This is also a play for the three billion poor. When combined with Google's sponsorship of the O3b satellite system, one can assume they have a cell phone in the works that is simple, cheap, and can be given away in return for “owning” your voice the way the US Post Office “owns” your name. The Google Trilogy remains the best open record of all that Google seeks to conceal.
GOOD NEWS from Ivan Popovski in Hungary. It looks like they force to be @sip.voice.google.com. The idea is that every person could easily install their own SIP proxy and media server, so in that case you don't need to be ‘@sip.voice.google.com‘ user, but you could register on ‘@yourdomain.com‘. Of course, you could call people on any
domain/IP. By the way, a few months ago I bought sipware.org/sipware.net, so I could develop method to rapidly install SIP proxy/media server on any computer. Hope to get live cd or something like that soon. Not sure how many of you are interested in this? That media server will be conferencing and will use open source codecs (speex/theora) + instant messaging (conferences also) and presence. Am in development phase. Anyway, when you have something like that, it is not hard to connect it with VoIP, and people already talked about OpenBTS and stuff like that.
Addendum: This is a Google “probe;” as one member of the Autonomous Internet discussion pointed out, it is only being done in the USA. To understand Google's larger strategy there is not finer reference than The Google Trilogy by Stephen E. Arnold. Another member of the group has pointed out that Google is in the business of earning profit for its shareholders, to which we respond with two observations: 1) they are still spending more in shareholder fantasy cash than they are actually earning; and 2) cyber-space is a commons–we cannot turn it over to corporations any more than we can turn over public services to corporations. Autonomous Internet–the Open Source Tri-Fecta–is a long-needed correction to what Winn Schaurtau called Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway.
