Dave Overton

In addition to my previous post about FaceTime, I had another realization today.

People have been dreaming about video calling for decades. iPhone 4 makes it a reality. With the tap of a button, you can wave hello to your kids, share a smile from across the globe, or watch your best friend laugh at your stories — iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 over Wi-Fi. No other phone makes staying in touch this much fun.

(emphasis mine) This not only changes the way we think about and use Video Calling, it changes the way we think about and use International Calling. This isn't a new concept, this has been the premise of Video Calling and VoIP for a long time. The difference is the implementation. Skype revolutionized Video Calling from a computer, and while they do have mobile apps the implementation has never been on option within a Carrier based call. No switching in the middle of a call. No switching from Carrier minutes to megabytes (even if it is Wifi only at the moment). Pretty much the same conclustions for VoIP, Vonage and others have revolutionized the cost structure of traditional phones. They also have apps for mobile devices, but again you are limited to calling from within their app and not via a Carrier based call. The exception to this rule has been Google Voice, which Google has implemented very well in the Android OS, and if you are a Google Voice user, you can opt to use Google Voice for the call. The one stark difference that remains is that Google Voice still relies on Carrier minutes, not megabytes. So both Google and Apple have now been able to push the Carriers in the direction that they want through these implementations. The Carriers have long suspected that Google has been out for them, however it appears that Apple may have really been the company they should have worried about. Depending on how the charges work out, this could dramatically affect the Carrier's current charging scheme which is minutes centric. As Dan Frommer reported:

For the next version of FaceTime that works over 3G, Apple and its carrier partners will need to decide how those calls are billed -- as minutes toward voice calling, as data toward monthly data caps, or both, or something entirely different.

For example: From the Philippines, if I dial a number in the US from my cell phone I will be charged around $.40 per minute. If I switch the call to FaceTime, it's free, because when you switch in the midst of a voice call, once the FaceTime call initiates, the voice call ceases. The caveat is that this requires an iPhone 4 on both sides of the call, as well as a WiFi connection, for now. Early estimates are predicting some 1.5 million sales on the first day alone. That number will continue to rise as the iPhone is released around the rest of the world. I predict that the next iPad will have a FaceTime feature, albeit slightly different, as well as implementation in either iChat and/or OS X. So theoretically speaking, by the time the iPhone 4 reaches the Philippines, there will be plenty of people for me to FaceTime with. The switch from Carrier minutes to megabytes is now in full swing. Will the carriers allow FaceTime to be opened up using their cellular data networks? Will another alternative arise that will give data connections to devices in a broad coverage area? I look forward to the improvements that are made in these areas. Again it seems very ironic, if not foreboding, that Carriers are adapting to a more limited model for data charges. Whatever these developments are, my point is that this will revolutionize Video Calling & International Calling, at least for my friends and family who get an iPhone.

Well, this is a little something that I have been working on. First let me just say that I love Google Voice, however I don't live in the US right now, but I do have a vast majority of my friends and family there. International calls and SMS are expensive, more so for them than for me, but it puts boundaries on communications. Google Voice frees that up...well sort of... Currently, Google Voice only supports US telephone numbers, so what I decided to do was to use it with another service: 3jam. 3jam would most likely be categorized as a competitor of Google Voice, but honestly my goal wasn't to find an alternative, but rather to find something that would allow me to set up a Mobile phone with a US number in Google Voice, so that people could SMS my GV number and it would forward to my actual cell phone. That is precisely were 3jam came into play. They provided me with at US number for a small fee, for calls and SMS, that I could forward to my Philippine cell phone. I set the number up in 3jam, added some credit to enable the International forwarding, added and confirmed the number within Google Voice, then tried out sending an SMS. FAIL! This was the only major glitch that I found: even though I had credit in my 3jam account to forward SMS's on to my cell phone, they were not forwarding. I was sending from another Philippine cell phone, so I was not getting a reply. I then sent a test from my GV account, and got a reply from 3jam, saying I did not have enough credit to forward. I sent an email to 3jam with the problem, and they fixed it a little while later. Now I can go to Google Voice, or use the iPhone app that I got before it was yanked from the App Store and send SMS's to my friends and family in the US for free. When they reply, it forwards to my Philippine cell phone for a small fee per message, granted that you do have to subscribe to 3jam to get the number, but until GV is open to international numbers, it works.