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Review by pandora See Profile

  • Location: Outland
  • Cost Contract price not specified.
Free service (for now)
Absolutely no customer support, no official ATA support
GV intends to be a PC based free VOIP service until the end of 2011
Web-site:
Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:

Update 3: I use Google Voice more and more, the service is great and it's free. Hard to beat decent VOIP for free.
Update 2: It's been a year since my last update, which is hard to believe. Google Voice still works fine with my Oibtalk devices. Had to beat free.
Update 1: I'm updating in a bit less than 6 months to synchronize all my provider reviews on a 6 month schedule. So far Google Voice has been an excellent deal, and the price has been great. The biggest problem is lack of customer support if there is a problem or if my account (and thus my phone number) were to be hacked.

Google Voice (GV) is a free VOIP service which seems intended to be PC based.

There are many numbers to choose from in my area, getting a number I liked was amazingly easy. There is no cost for Google Voice at least until the end of 2011.

Voice quality seems to vary a bit, some days it's very good, other days it isn't. If there is a change for better (or worse) I'll update this review.

My access to Google Voice is via an Obihai ATA. I pick up my phone, and can dial numbers in the U.S. Google also provides an incoming phone number, people may call me. There is no charge for the Google service, but Obihai charges $44 or $50 for their low and high end ATA's (respectively).

The google website is decent, though set up wasn't as easy as it could have been (I needed to activate Google Chat with Google Voice for some reason). Google seems to provide no direct technical support. Also while Obihai seems able to function as an ATA, it appears Google isn't actively supporting it's service through ATA's.

There is no 911 or E911 service. I'd be concerned if my email was hacked that my phone number could be lost with it. Without customer service, it's tough to consider Google Voice as a full replacement VOIP service. Instead I use it as a supplementary free VOIP service.

member for 22.8 years, 6388 visits, last login: 1 year ago
updated 11 years ago

hottboiinnc4
ME
join:2003-10-15
Cleveland, OH

hottboiinnc4

Member

Replacement

GV was never meant to be a replacement service. It's there way of just obtaining more data for the end-user.

What hurts Google the most is there is NO customer service (not lack of). Even businesses do NOT get customer support for paid products. Welcome to the world of Google.
ArizonaSteve
join:2004-01-31
Apache Junction, AZ

1 edit

ArizonaSteve

Member

Outgoing calls?

I haven't seen any capability for GV to place outgoing calls.
Can you explain how you are able to do that?
Never mind, after reading the directions for setting up the Obi device I noticed that you have to configure GV on the obitalk.com web site so it's not really calling through GV directly but using obitalk.com as a sip client to forward calls to GV. I wonder if there is any way to get it to call GV directly cause the Obi device will be non-functional if Obi ever goes bust?
pandora
Premium Member
join:2001-06-01
Outland

pandora

Premium Member

Re: Outgoing calls?

said by ArizonaSteve:

I haven't seen any capability for GV to place outgoing calls.
Can you explain how you are able to do that?
Never mind, after reading the directions for setting up the Obi device I noticed that you have to configure GV on the obitalk.com web site so it's not really calling through GV directly but using obitalk.com as a sip client to forward calls to GV. I wonder if there is any way to get it to call GV directly cause the Obi device will be non-functional if Obi ever goes bust?

I think you can configure the ObiTalk device locally (and not use the OBI website). Google Voice doesn't passwords don't have to be provided to OBI IIRC.
ArizonaSteve
join:2004-01-31
Apache Junction, AZ

ArizonaSteve

Member

Re: Outgoing calls?

On Voxilla there are directions for setting up the Obi device locally. However they say to set SignalingProtocol to “Google Voice” and other devices don't have that option or Gtalk so I guess you can't use a Cisco phone, SunRocket box or other device with GV.
»voxilla.com/2011/01/24/h ··· ree-2512
pandora
Premium Member
join:2001-06-01
Outland

pandora

Premium Member

Re: Outgoing calls?

said by ArizonaSteve:

On Voxilla there are directions for setting up the Obi device locally. However they say to set SignalingProtocol to “Google Voice” and other devices don't have that option or Gtalk so I guess you can't use a Cisco phone, SunRocket box or other device with GV.
»voxilla.com/2011/01/24/h ··· ree-2512

My understanding is you can establish an application specific password for your google voice account. The password will only work with that application.

To see how to do this, visit »www.obitalk.com/forum/in ··· ic=742.0

The accounts I'm using are junk accounts (at this time). Later, if GV charges, I may look into this more.