Google is all geared up to take the VOIP industry to another level now, and they will be launching the facility with which you can receive and make calls inside Canada and the United States for free, at least until the start of 2011. This could come as a big competition to the other existing VOIP leaders like Skype.

In your G-mail chat box, you will be able to see a new entry, “Call Phone”. If you click on that, it will open a virtual telephone keypad on your browser. However, you will need to install a plug in for the Gmail chat in order to be able to use this facility. Google with all its strategies should be able to come out as a strong contender for voip calls to the users.

With Gmail we can make video and voice calls between two computers until now, but we could not make calls to the telephone lines. It would be quite a major advancement, if they are able to provide the feature of calling the cell phones and land lines from the computers.

Skype also allows its users to do voice and a video chat from their applications, but they charge a minimal fee for making calls to the telephone lines. This is exactly where Google could prove to be a major threat to the bottom-line of Skype, at least for a certain period. They are well on their way to provide free browser to telephone calls for the rest of the year.

During this period, the company will also assess the possibility of compensating with the revenues that they would generate from the international call facilities provided from G-mail voice integration. If they are able to do so, they could plan on extending the free voip calls even in 2011, which looks like quite a possibility from here.

At the same time, their charges for international calls from the United States are cheaper than the rates that are being offered by some of the leading VOIP providers. The landline calling rates start with as low as 2¢ per minute. However, the charges for calling the cell phones will be on the higher side.

You could buy the international credits with the minimum denomination of $10.00. Higher denominations will also be available for purchase.

Another facility provided with this integration is that you will be able to transfer your mobile phone calls to your computer and save on the call times, or you could even transfer your computer calls to your cell phone, if you have to be on the move.

Google strategy to get into VOIP industry might have initiated the acquiring of Gizmo5, which is one of the VOIP service providers that allowed making calls to the regular telephones from the computers. Another company which they had taken over few months back was Global IP Solutions, who were one of the specialists in HD telephony.

Skype still holds an upper hand since they are quite well established worldwide, whereas Google would be focusing mostly in the United States at least for the year.