 jester121Premium
join:2003-08-09
Lake Zurich, IL
 ·voip.ms
| No clever subject comes to mind My understanding is that the US/Canada market is somewhat unique in that the cell phone account owner pays for incoming calls just like regular minutes, whereas in many foreign countries the caller gets hit with a premium for calling mobile numbers (which frequently have a separate "area code" type designation for ease of billing). Clearly the Google Voice approach doesn't work there.
For the couple of US carriers who have free incoming (Nextel, US Cellular, any others?) this is a potential alarm bell, because ther's no reason for anyone to ever use any outgoing minutes (assuming you have a data plan and can reach the GV website to place calls).
And speaking of which, everyone seems to be overlooking the fact that Google Voice isn't really "free" phone calls -- it's just that Google is paying the charges. It's free to the user, but there is still a cost associated with it. And it can be cancelled at any time (or switched to ad-supported, which many of us would find annoying). |
