Google wants to offer cheap phone calls by broadband

Google wants to offer cheap phone calls by broadband

Google is the latest dotcom business looking to increase its revenues by offering broadband internet users the ability to make cheap phone calls over the web.

The California-based internet search engine is doing some searching of its own, looking for a "strategic negotiator" to help the company deal with telecoms companies to put together "a global backbone network" which will help it increase the services it can provide.

Google, which carries almost half of all internet search queries globally, is one of many companies looking to offer residential customers the chance to use their existing broadband internet connections to make cheap phone calls using technology called voice over internet protocol (VoIP).

Internet service providers Wanadoo and AOL are already looking at using the technology to increase the revenues they make from their existing internet access customers.

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For Google, which was unavailable for comment yesterday, providing a telephony service would give the search engine its first chance to gain an insight into who uses its website. The information would improve the service it offers to its advertisers.

Industry observers reckon that through VoIP Google would also be able to add new functions such as click to dial - where an advertiser's web-page has a special button that connects an internet phone straight to a call centre.

At its most basic level, VoIP offers free calling. Services such as Skype and Gossiptel allow broadband users to download software on to their computers and call other broadband users with exactly the same software for free regardless of where they are. But problems arise when VoIP users wish to call or be called by people who are not using the same technology or who are on mobile phone networks.

To connect a call across networks incurs an interconnect fee which shatters the ideal of free internet phone calls as the VoIP service provider finds itself having to pay for the privilege of being part of the international telephony market.

VoIP specialist Vonage launched a broadband telephony service in the UK from £9.99 offering unlimited calling to landline phones in the UK and Ireland. At Christmas BT ran a promotion offering a year's free internet calls to new broadband customers along with a free VoIP headset.

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