Google talk to dial PSTN. Free calling to be a reality soon?

By Vivek | May 21st, 2007 at 01:45 pm ET         

Nothing unexpected in the first part of title. In fact users getting to call regular phone numbers from Google Talk was bound to happen sooner than later. The above was caught by Tom@Tmcnet in the Google Apps Training presentation. “Show Dialpad” and “Enter a name of phone number” give away the secret in the image shown below.

Ruslan Zalata and his Russia based GTalk2VoIP team had been providing a similar functionality for the past year, but there is nothing like a service integrated into Google Talk itself.

Tom expects free PSTN calling play from Google. Now, who is on the other side? I think free PSTN calling over Google Talk can be something as a precursor to free calling over mobile phones. This is something that Blyk has been building up for in Europe, and what Eric Schmidt had hinted sometime last year. Still, to start with it is much easier for Google to deliver ads on Google Talk, then on mobile phones. If Google delivers 1 ad impression per call, going by an optimistic $10 CPM based ad(since Google does not have to share the rev with anyone) would make 1 cent/call for Google. Now that is way better then earning nothing over millions of calls. Looking at those numbers, Skype’s $30/year for unlimited calling within US seems to be under threat. I mean, Skype charges 3000 cents per year, which in other words is 8.21 Google calls/day(3000/365days) you need to make get free calling. Suppose instead of 1, Google delivers 2 ads per call. That makes it approx 4 calls per day we need to make to get the free calling. I think most of us call more then that anyway.

As it seems, eBay’s dream of recovering $4 billion from Skype is going to be a dream after all.