
Google Voice now lets you port your own phone number - shawndumas
http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/19/google-voice-now-lets-you-port-your-own-phone-number/
======
luu
Is there any hope of getting support from google if something goes wrong with
your google voice number?

Google voice worked great for me for over a year but, now, there seems to be
about a 1/20 chance that any particular text message will get dropped, and a
1/10 chance that any call will get a message that says "we're sorry, you've
reached a number that's been disconnected or is no longer in service. . ." And
if that weren't enough, voicemail stopped working for me a couple of weeks
ago.

Cell phone companies are notorious for having poor customer service, but it's
at least possible to navigate their phone tree to reach a human who can
escalate things to another human, one who actually has the power to get things
fixed. Now, I kinda regret giving out my google voice number, since I'm going
to have to get everyone to switch to my 'real' cell number if google doesn't
spontaneously decide to fix these bugs.

~~~
rufugee
As a paying customer of Google Apps, I have an incredibly difficult time
getting decent customer support for the paid services, so I wouldn't hold my
breath. Also, in the past I have submitted tickets for other free service like
Analytics and they have gone unanswered each and every time.

Google is great at innovating, but their support story is pathetic. It's the
big reason we stopped a 1000-person migration and stuck withbExchange (except
for a small group of techies).

~~~
gcb
As a sucker who bought a phone from google, i'd say Stay away from anything
critical from them!

still finds it difficult to answer a simple phone call if the phone is
charging for more then 10min. As i have to lock the screen, then unlock (to
work around a software bug in the touch driver), enter the password (damn work
email), and finally, slide to answer (or more likely, see who called and call
them back)

~~~
timdorr
You didn't buy a phone from Google, you bought it from HTC (I assume this is
the Nexus One, the same as I have) with heavy Google branding on it. If you
want to get hardware support, you'll go through HTC directly. Learn your
lesson that HTC has shitty component quality and _never_ buy from them again.
Google just makes the software, which works fine. The hardware in the Nexus
One is another story...

As soon as some good dual core phones ship this year, I'm jumping ship off the
HTC boat.

~~~
quadhome
Those sure sounded like software complaints...

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mcantor
This is like saying "The Titanic now lets you bring your own lawn chair." I
wish I had never started using Google Voice. The Android app is so janky that
it may as well not exist. It's been three years and I still can't receive
picture messages. Text messages get dropped 20% of the time, and you have to
choose between having them forwarded to your cell phone with contact names
inexplicably prepended to every message (often resulting in long texts being
split up into 3 or more parts that get delivered in the wrong order) or having
them delivered via pull notification on the Android app, which _might_ notify
you of new texts within 24 hours. Sometimes, calls will instantly disconnect
when I pick them up. There is no support. There is no hope. There is only
Google, the Fortress of Customer Solitude.

~~~
ifthen
At the risk of complaining about a free service, the most frustrating/humorous
part is their voice to text translation service. While about the only thing
that comes out accurate is the number the call came from, the rest of the
conversation translates to phrases that are worse than any drunk dial line.
Again, good for a laugh but not dependable enough to build a solid business
model on if you’re trying for a large piece of the cell market.

~~~
mcantor
Oh, it's no risk. I openly complain about Google Voice and it has never been
anything except 100% free-as-in-beer. I _wish_ I paid for Google Voice so I
could demand that they refund me. You see, I got on board when it was still
called GrandCentral, and there seemed to be every intention to create a Real
Product with Real Support that people would pay Real Money for. Then Google
bought it, and I figured, "Great! Now it'll be a Real Product just like Google
search or Gmail, but free, or at least affordable!" Instead I got this
_bupkus_. Bah, humbug! etc.

The transcriptions are fabulous, by the way--I think a great business model
would be piping them into a web service for use instead of Markov chains in
spam e-mail. Once it translated an entire message from my Dad as an ominous
string of "Ha ha ha ha ha"s.

~~~
gcb
the english transcripts of international messages are the best

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wgrover
The details:

The cost of porting is $20 (payable through Google Checkout).

Your mobile phone service plan will be terminated when you port your number to
Google Voice and your carrier may charge you an early termination fee.

Once porting is complete, you will not be able to receive calls to your mobile
phone until you complete the following steps:

Google Voice is not a mobile phone service provider, so you must setup a new
mobile phone service plan (with your existing carrier or a new carrier) and
request a new number.

Once you've secured a new mobile service plan and a new number, you will need
to add this new number to your Google Voice account as a forwarding phone.

You may be unable to receive text messages for up to 3 business days after the
porting process is complete.

Your Google Voice number will be replaced by the number you are porting. It
will remain on your account for 90 days.

~~~
jjcm
This seems like quite a bit of hassle for what it provides. It'll be
interesting to see how many users actually go through with this. On a somewhat
related note, anyone know what happened with the 333 US area code that google
purchased a while back? I know they offered numbers under that for a while,
but stopped offering them due to issues with carriers.

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chanri
Does anybody here also notice a lag during Google voice calls?

Sometimes the lag is up to half a second or one second, and it can really make
conversations difficult because you start interrupting the other person (even
though you don't realize it and think you started talking when there was a
lull in the conversation).

~~~
jeffclark
Definitely. This is the only reason I won't use GV as my primary number. I
don't call often, but when I do, I expect it to work.

(However, after reading some of these comments and using my noggin, I'm not
sure I'd trust something as critical as my phone to a company who's notorious
for no customer service.)

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bakbak
I'm really surprised that mobile phone companies are not providing exact same
features as GV ... GV features are nice but not impossible to implement...

so i wonder what will happen if to undermine competition from GV, Verizon
gives away a phone number that will be ringed (or forwarded) to 'n' number of
devices and sends you sms and email message if someone leaves you voice
message... how difficult is this to implement for a company that spends
millions of tech dollars on almost daily basis???

~~~
cd34
Wildfire was absolutely spectacular, and I think better than GV. Too bad they
didn't adapt. I believe someone has ported similar features to Asterisk.

Bell Atlantic (Verizon now) years ago had something very similar with
ContactLine. You had 99 preprogrammed 'call plans'. 1-9 would forward through
with various options, 10-19 would forward with screening, in the 30s you could
check in and it would forward the call to the location where you were, with a
greeting to call the person. 60-69 call plans would page you, allow you to get
to a phone, and it would bridge the call. I believe produced by Octel, later
purchased by AT&T, spun off into Avaya. Back in the late 80s, made the mobile
phone incredibly powerful - back when phones had 3 watts, not the .6 watts we
have today. :)

Vonage has Simulring which has some of the features that Google Voice has.

However, to the phone companies, any solution here is a cost center, not a
profit center (except ContactLine which was $19.95/month). It is difficult to
get them to spend even more money providing a service that a fraction of their
users would use.

~~~
bradleyland
Parts of Wildfire live on under the commercial ownership/guidance of Jive
software:

<http://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/index.jsp>

There are quite a few interesting products over there.

~~~
cd34
That doesn't look like the Wildfire from CR Technologies - just a product
similarly named.

Wildfire as a phone service ran on Dialogic cards and acted like a virtual
assistant. Calls you made were bridged through, so, you could have an 800#
pointed to your wildfire number and call from a payphone. You would call in,
listen to your voicemail and with voice commands be able to direct it to call
the person back, conference in someone, etc. If you were listening to messages
when an incoming call was coming in, wildfire would tell you that you had an
incoming call, etc.

The real power of it was building your contact list. If you called my number,
Wildfire would interview you. I couldn't find any of the old audio demos that
used to be online, but, it went something like this:

Chris isn't available can I take a message? you speak the message, Wildfire
would say, can I ask for a callback number? you would give the number, I
heard, 555-1414 is this correct? yes. Is this a work or mobile number? work. I
don't recognize this number, may I ask for more information? Yes (would
register your name, additional numbers, weekend number, etc) Ok, thank you,
I'll have Chris call you when he get the message.

At this point, Wildfire would page me with a code, # of messages, etc. Keep in
mind, while you were on the line, Wildfire was already calling any registered
numbers I had to try and contact me and would bridge the connection if
possible. You call in, listen to the message, Wildfire would connect the call.
During the call, if you needed to conference in someone, you said WildFire
'Here I am' Call Bob, 'Do you want to add this call to a conference?' Yes.
'Dialing'

If you called into the 800#, you could also direct calls from there. Depending
on the interview Wildfire got from an incoming caller you could say: Wildfire,
'Here I am' Call Bill, 'I have a work and mobile number' Dial work, 'Dialing'.
Wildfire would listen in, make sure the call was connected, offer to dial the
mobile number if you didn't get a connection, etc.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOq2Ks-aPcA>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYCxtagsvdM>

are two demos that I could find.

I've written so many notes regarding this. With sip service being as
inexpensive as it is, and contact management software being in the cloud, it
would be a very powerful tie-in. For a product in the mid to late 90s, it was
very ahead of its time making road warriors very efficient.

~~~
bradleyland
Hence "parts" :) Jive used to have Wildfire, in its entirety, in their
website. It has since dwindled to the Asterisk integration stuff you see on
their website now.

~~~
cd34
That is a different Wildfire. From what I can tell, that is the Wildfire IM
platform. The Wildfire I'm talking about was from CR Technologies, and was a
voice telecom product, was sold in the mid 90s until it was discontinued
around 2001 - with Orange Telecom having the last working enterprise
installation until 2005, though, they wouldn't add any new clients after 2003.

------
mark_l_watson
I would like to switch our land line telephone number to Google Voice. My wife
and I use our cellphones 95% of the time, but old acquaintances still
sometimes call our old landline number. Looks like there is no support for
this?

~~~
URSpider94
There is a work-around for this, but it's somewhat painful and not guaranteed
to work. You can port a land-line number to Vonage (at least in many cases,
not all localities support LNP at this time, but you can check your number for
portability at Vonage.com). You should then be able to port your Vonage number
into Google Voice. I have not tried this second step, but it should work.

EDIT: Apparently, it doesn't work for VOIP numbers at this time. Nonetheless,
Vonage does offer many of the same features as GV, like multi-forwarding and
VM transcription, for a reasonable, flat monthly fee.

I ported my wife's 212 phone number (the original area code for Manhattan,
before overlays, arguably the most sought-after area code in the country) to
Vonage before we left NYC. People are always asking me how I did it. To be
fair, it took almost two months to complete the port, and there was a lot of
yelling on the phone at Vonage and AT&T (previous landline service provider)
in the interim. For a while there, I thought that the number was lost for
good.

I will warn you, if you move across time zones, porting your home number may
come back to bite you -- we regularly get calls from businesses at 9:05 AM
EST, which is 6:05 AM PST ...

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WesleyJohnson
So if I port my real cell number over to Google Voice and my cell plan gets
canceled, then isn't Google Voice basically useless because I wouldn't have a
cell to forward it to? It'd be nice if they could work with carriers to assign
you a new number and transfer your existing to GV in one transaction.

~~~
philwelch
The idea is that you then get new service, with a new number you can use as
your primary number with the old one still forwarding. Basically the
equivalent of a forwarding address.

However, this may be preparation for the other shoe to drop. The other shoe
would be some kind of data-only plan for Android phones where your actual
phone service is simply VoIP with your Google Voice number, over the data
plan.

~~~
georgemcbay
That seems likely in the future, particularly since Gingerbread (Android 2.3)
supports SIP-based Internet calling out of the box now.

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beoba
Can you also port a GV number to somewhere else?

~~~
johns
I know you can port them to Twilio :) (I work at Twilio)

~~~
nkurz
Interesting. Could you describe the procedure? I started at porting from
Google to another (Callcentric) and didn't know how to provide the billing
documentation they asked for. What do you ask people to provide?

~~~
danielle17
There is no fee to port a number with Twilio, and once you port it in it is
$1/month to hold onto the number. To port, you log into your Twilio account
and visit the phone numbers tab and select "port number", or hit this URL
<https://www.twilio.com/user/account/phone-numbers/porting>

At this point, you fill out a form asking for the billing information and then
we follow up with you to get authorization to transfer the number (usually
just a signature). It usually takes about 10 business days to complete the
port.

(I work at Twilio too)

~~~
nkurz
Thanks for the follow up. What do you accept as billing information for a
Google Voice number? That's the part I got stuck on. Is this merely a
formality? Is a screen shot of the account page acceptable? As a free service,
they have never sent me a "bill".

~~~
stanleydrew
I'm pretty sure we accept a screen shot of the account page.

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nhangen
For me, the beauty of Google Voice is having an additional number through
which I can route texts and calls so that I can filter them how I see fit.

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mieses
Does Google Voice number portability apply to:

\- pre-paid mobile numbers?

\- VOIP carriers?*

\- mobile numbers that were previously landline numbers?

\- all US-based mobile carriers or just a handful?

* I remember reading that some VOIP carriers are considered mobile carriers.

~~~
mieses

      These providers appear to be supported:
        Verizon Wireless
        AT&T
        Sprint (As well as Boost Mobile, Virgin Mobile, Nextel and other related providers)
        T-Mobile
        Tracfone (And other related providers)
      These providers appear to be unsupported:
        Cricket Wireless
        US Cellular
    

according to
[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=76caf...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=76cafff1fc95a4c7&hl=en)

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awolf
Timed perfectly before the launch of the Verizon iPhone.

I wonder how long Google has been keeping this one up its sleeve?

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ph0rque
So, _that_ is how google is becoming a mobile phone company (among other
things)...

