
Google Grabs 1 Million Phone Numbers for Google Voice - nreece
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/166978/google_grabs_1_million_phone_numbers_for_google_voice.html
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notauser
1 million numbers is not a great deal - Level 3 charges around 3 cents per
month for a US number in volumes of 1000+.

$30k a month should be noise for Google, compared to the cost of running out
of numbers. I'm actually surprised they didn't buy more.

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buugs
Maybe they are going "small" beta.

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oomkiller
I for one can't wait for Google Voice, it should help cut down on some of the
robo-call spam i've been receiving lately! Not to mention the other AWESOME
features it has. Honestly when I first heard visual voicemail, I assumed it
used speech recognition to convert voice to text. That isn't what it turned
out to be, but luckily Google had the same idea and built it. Great for people
who HATE listening to voicemails (like me)

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viraptor
To be honest there's nothing "new" in their offer. Look for business voip
providers in your area and you'll see that those "awesome" features are simple
things that you can get from almost anyone.

Disclaimer: I work for a VoIP company and you can get almost all the features
for ~7£/mo. Yes - it costs you more than google will charge you probably, but
at least we have a support number if anything goes wrong ;) Also you can keep
adding more PSTN numbers to that account. Google voice wants to support only
one as far as I can tell.

The only features from Google Voice list we don't support are: 'Listen in'
(which I think would be illegal in UK), 'Personalize greeting' (noone asked
for it really). 'Phone switch' is possible, but not as smooth as with GV. In
general, I don't see anything new in their offer. Sure - it will be cheap, but
also it won't be easy to get support if anything goes wrong (and do you really
want to risk your main phone number this way?) They may advertise it as a new
service, but in reality they're only catching up to the features others
already have. Only thing I expect them to do better is "user experience" in
configuring all this stuff. (but don't worry - normal VoIP providers will copy
their control panel ideas in no time)

Ah - just in case you think of VoIP that has to be transmitted over internet -
stop. If you get a "proper" account from a provider who uses his own lines
rather than forwarding trunks to some other company, your traffic doesn't have
to touch the "best effort" internet at all. Your call will come in directly to
the company over a guaranteed channel line, get routed and will leave over
another guaranteed channel. (if you forward the call to your real mobile /
other phone, that is)

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angstrom
It's already active as of April if you had a previous account with
GrandCentral. They've polished the interface some and added some features like
transcription which I don't believe was available (at least not in the free
version of GC). The 2 main reasons I see using it are:

1) As a one to many phone number that lets people dial your home, work, cell
numbers simultaneously.

2) As a filter so you won't get unwanted calls at inconvenient times ie
recruiter cold calls during work hours.

There's more, but these are the 2 ways I used it before Google basically let
the service die so it could be absorbed and reworked.

In order to keep your original phone number still secret you currently have to
have Google connect you and the number you want to call. I can see this being
handled by a dialer app on the iPhone or seamlessly on an android phone in the
future. There's no cost for US only calls.

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rufo
There's already a pretty decent integration app for iPhone:

[http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftwa...](http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=309836317&mt=8)

There also seems to be a similar app for Android (no full integration yet):
<http://www.cyrket.com/package/com.evancharlton.googlevoice>

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empone
[http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/061809-google-voice-
la...](http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/061809-google-voice-launching-
this-week.html)

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TrevorJ
Long story short, nobody know when it will launch.

