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Phone switching service an easy transition away from telcos

With Google's purchase of GrandCentral Communications in July 2007, the company set up a way to pull people away from their relationships with wireless phone carriers.

When the FCC forced wireless operators to allow for the portability of cellphone numbers from one carrier to another, the industry obeyed the directive with plenty of reluctance. A natural desire to not have to lose a phone number already known to lots of people kept subscribers from ditching carriers for competitors with better deals.

If the wireless plans by Google and other white space usage backers in the Wireless Innovation Alliance hope to bring more people along to their service, they will have to offer portability, or at least a reasonable facsimile of it.

Enter GrandCentral. Though the use of the free service, people may establish a phone number that routes to their existing phones. Management features in GrandCentral allow users to manage their caller relationships, whether it's with personalized voicemail greetings for some callers, or blocking undesirable ones.

We expect to see more of a push for GrandCentral adoption up to and through February 2009, when television leaves the 700MHz spectrum and the white spaces open up for Google and its wireless partners.

If they can get more people to set up a GrandCentral number now, and route it to their existing numbers, it will be trivial to add a new destination number from a Google-backed, Android-powered device to Grand Central later.

Depending on how well the white spaces network operates, people may be tempted to ditch existing wireless telecom accounts for what should be a much lower cost service from Google and company. If that happens, Verizon may have promised to pay $4.74 billion for the proverbial pig in a poke.