It sounds like a boring feature, but I think it has a lot more power than it appears. I don't mean power do do things on your phone...I mean power to change an industry!
What SIP has the power to do is decouple voice service from the data service on a phone. Who needs to shovel piles if cash at a carrier for minutes, if a VoIP carrier can provide unlimited minutes for cheap?
Now...Google has implemented the foundation API's and support in a way that anyone can use them for their own service. Already it may make sense to sign up for a $10 or $20 SIP account to bypass carrier minutes. I may do just this on Dec 16th...I hardly use voice at all...looks like I can get unlimited incoming for $10/month, with 2 cents/min outgoing.
Prediction...what's next? Google Voice over IP.
The wireless carrier is suddenly a dumb IP pipe like Google wants them to be. I'm sure there are people inside Google doing this already...it's a simple matter of software configuration.
I suspect this may be a key reason carriers are dropping unlimited data left and right. They know the future of voice may be in the data pipe...their per minute cash cow could vanish...and the future is now.
What SIP has the power to do is decouple voice service from the data service on a phone. Who needs to shovel piles if cash at a carrier for minutes, if a VoIP carrier can provide unlimited minutes for cheap?
Now...Google has implemented the foundation API's and support in a way that anyone can use them for their own service. Already it may make sense to sign up for a $10 or $20 SIP account to bypass carrier minutes. I may do just this on Dec 16th...I hardly use voice at all...looks like I can get unlimited incoming for $10/month, with 2 cents/min outgoing.
Prediction...what's next? Google Voice over IP.
The wireless carrier is suddenly a dumb IP pipe like Google wants them to be. I'm sure there are people inside Google doing this already...it's a simple matter of software configuration.
I suspect this may be a key reason carriers are dropping unlimited data left and right. They know the future of voice may be in the data pipe...their per minute cash cow could vanish...and the future is now.