wifitalk.ca

A big thanks to reader @ianmurchison for this tip.

It seems as though the integration of gizmo5 into Google Voice is steadily progressing, taking one more step last week. The gizmo5.com domain was transferred to google on 18 January 2010, and now gizmo5.com redirects to google.com/gizmo5.

Gizmo5 was a VOIP company which provided both software and a service which allowed users to make VOIP calls. Similar to the popular skype-in/skype-out service offered by Skype, gizmo5 allowed users to register a phone number to attach to their gizmo5 software or device for the purposes of receiving calls, and allowed users to use the service to make cheap calls out to regular phone numbers.

Back in November of 2009, google acquired gizmo5, adding the missing piece to google’s telecommunications services.

It looks as though google’s intentions are to incorporate gizmo5’s VOIP capabilities with google voice’s services to provide a full VOIP service on its Android devices. This means one could have a fully functioning phone through google on only a data plan – no voice plan would be required. Furthermore, due to google voice’s cheap long distance rates, one could conceivably get unlimited talk and text in North America on just a data plan.

As noted in the comments of the How-to: Google Voice in Canada post, and further explored in the Google Voice Charging For Calls To Canada post, calls to Canada through google voice seem to now cost $0.02 per minute instead of being free.

Astute reader @ianmurchison noticed something interesting:

It has been known for a while now that google has acquired Gizmo5, a VOIP company which has the ability to place and terminate calls to standard phone numbers. The acquisition gave google the piece it needed to start offering full VOIP service. With the switch to a $0.02 per minute charge for google voice calls to Canada – the same that Gizmo5 charged – we could be looking at the incorporation of Gizmo5’s VOIP abilities into google voice.

It shouldn’t be long now until google starts offering full VOIP service.