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This article in today’s Times of London predicts that Google will offer Voice over IP telephone service to consumers in the near future. The source of this story, a UK telecom analyst, bases her prediction on this job ad seeking a person skilled in negotiating contracts for large international IP networks.

I rarely set forth firm predictions on this blog, but here’s one I’m sure about: Google will not offer VoIP-to-PSTN calling to consumers within the next two years. This supposed “clue” to Google’s future service offerings is nothing of the sort. Google needs lots of colocation space and lots of bandwidth all over the world just to scale the services they already offer to a worldwide customer base. That Google is buying some dark fiber doesn’t mean they’re about to start offering telephone calls or broadband lines or anything else; it means they need gobs of bandwidth between a handful of large data centers worldwide, to keep synchronized copies of their databases in multiple places at once. As they scale the Gmail service, the need for fast sync will become greater, so it’s natural that they’ll need someone skilled in buying the inputs they’ll need to make their product.

You want a Google employment announcement that really means something? They hired Ben Goodger, the Firefox project lead.

(Via Gizmodo, who aren’t as skeptical as I’d expect)