
Brad Feld: Google Voice Was So Very Close To Working - stakent
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2010/01/google-voice-was-so-very-close-to-working.html
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willwagner
The other feature that I wish was possible is connecting two google voice
accounts to one phone number. At first, I thought it was going to be a great
solution for our kids; have a single number we give to our school, after
school classes, pediatricians, etc that when you called it, it automatically
would ring our home phone, my wife's cell, and my cell all at the same time.
Unfortunately, you can only attach a phone to a single account, so my wife and
I either both have to use it in only this one situation, or simply not use it
at all for this situation.

I can see why they limit it because a phone number has a cost associated with
it and you wouldn't want a user to have a 100 different voice accts, but I
think this kind of usage would be pretty useful.

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travisp
This is partly inaccurate. You _can_ connect two Google Voice accounts to one
number, as long as it is marked as your "home" or "work" number (not a
"cell").

However, if you actually used your cell phones in this way, then you'd give up
the SMS receiving I think.

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qeorge
I use Google Voice as my primary personal number, and have had several folks
tell me that it "rings and rings" (voicemail never picks up). And I would have
to agree, their transcription is a joke.

All that said, its still a pretty damn good service for being free. But they
have a lot of work to do before Voice is ready to be a part of their Google
Apps offering.

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mcantor
tl;dr: Google Voice still has no "keep your number" support; poster attempts
to forward a phone number to another phone number that forwards to his other
phones; hilarity ensues.

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Splines
IMO, I think the reason why they don't have LNP isn't because of technical
reasons (meaning that they could have added LNP long ago), it's because Google
Voice isn't ready. They don't want to see the horror stories of people
committing to Google Voice and being disappointed - as it is, it has a low
enough enter/exit friction that people don't feel bad if it isn't working
right.

The Author is giving the Google a lot of benefit of the doubt here - Google
can only ride their karma for so long before people start expecting a product
that works.

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bmelton
I've also noticed that Google Voice, despite its awesome feature set, is just
not very reliable. I absolutely prefer to use it as my primary phone number,
but I've noticed repeated problems with just using the service, a good deal of
the time.

Outbound calls (from my phone) that use the Google Voice service often times
just don't connect.

Inbound calls often don't ring my phone, and go straight to voice mail.

I've never noticed an SMS message fail altogether, but I have seen a number of
occasions in which it was delayed so significantly that it might as well have.

Perhaps the most important glitch to me (and this isn't a service complaint,
so much) is that MMS messages are just ignored. I don't receive them, or any
notification that one was sent, and from what I can tell, there is no message
/ delivery failure sent to the sender either. This is a problem for me.

Despite all these problems, I still LIKE Google Voice, and continue to use it,
despite its unreliability. If I'm dealing with time-sensitive matters or
financially sensitive ones, I just give out my non-IP phone number, to ensure
that I at least get the calls, but my main want for Google Voice is to replace
my regular number, so that I can change phones & carriers at will, that
doesn't really sit well either.

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yardie
I've had GV since it was GrandCentral and I still can't make heads or tails of
it. I have my GV number, SkypeIn number, plus my regular phone number. All
three are using some form of VoIP yet all negotiating takes place over 10
digit number. I thought it would be a great way for me to recieve calls while
travelling but the utility is limited at best. Fring is moderately useful in
being able to link MSN, Skype, and SIP. But GV is left out.

I'm still waiting on one true phone number to rule them all. Until then I'll
continue to use Skype and check my GV mailbox.

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sdfszdfs
The Google Voice number I chose with was bombarded with calls from collections
agencies. A freed number is more likely to come from someone who has abandoned
their service due to non-payment. Google should have checked for this before
offering these numbers. Based on what they've already built screening for
collections calls would've been well within what they could do.

When I attempted to disable the number the process was extremely frustrating.
I couldn't simply turn it off. I had to reassign it to another valid phone
number. (No thanks.) I eventually got around this by following their
suggestion to disable several AT&T forwarding and messaging services. This
left me unhappy. What if I want to use these services for something else?

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iigs
_Google should have checked for this before offering these numbers._

In a lot of NPAs (area codes) there just aren't any never-assigned numbers
left. My brother waited, for months I believe, for a GV number in 512
(Austin).

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hexis
I'm not sure when he was trying to get his number, but I got a 512 number when
I signed up a few months ago. I think I could even pick among a bunch of 512
numbers.

