Dave Overton

I recently read John Gruber's post on FaceTime, the new video calling technology Apple has implemented in the iPhone 4. He says:

More importantly, you don’t need to initiate a FaceTime call using a voice call. You can start the call using FaceTime directly, in which case the entire process takes place over IP networking. The advantage to starting with a voice call is that you’ll get a voice connection even if the recipient isn’t on Wi-Fi at the moment.

Now this is a great feature. The ability to initiate FaceTime calls without a voice call is a step in the right direction. The reading starts to get really interesting here:

But surely, someday, there will be a non-phone-carrier wireless networking technology with far greater range than Wi-Fi. FaceTime, I think, is a first step in the direction of a mobile “phone” with no mobile carrier. If and when FaceTime is supported over 3G in addition to Wi-Fi, it’ll be data, not voice — megabytes, not minutes. And immediately, starting today, it’s a step away from tying your iPhone’s “calls” to your carrier’s network.

Considering that two major carriers are moving in the opposite direction of this megabytes, not minutes concept, by cutting back unlimited data plans: Verizon hints, AT&T Does, it sets up an interesting future. So Apple with FaceTime and Google with (Google) Voice are both changing the way we use our phones with new technology. At the end of the day I agree with John's point that it is megabytes, not minutes. The megabytes will prevail in the end, and the real question is if the carrier's path is to cut down the megabytes, who is going to provide a larger than Wi-Fi coverage technology.

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.