said by cb14:Google voice IS an unfair competition and causes a lot of damage to BYOD VoIP carriers and by the virtue of that to all of us here. People who defend this foolishness really do not see further than the tip of their nose.
There are two problems for BYOD here. #1, the artificial "free"; as miserable as it might be it's still free and it's difficult to compete with something what's "free".
Google's raison d'etre over the past decade plus has been to be disruptive in every market they enter. They've taken previously paid services and started offering them for free at least as long as Gmail came around versus the non-free e-mail providers who charged for spam filtering and space over 4 megabytes. Since when must business' be fair to their competition? (Assuming they aren't planning to raise prices after putting the competition out of business.)
#2, getting out the message. Even my neighbors know or heard about Google Voice, Magic Jack, Nettalk, Ooma, Skype or Vonage.
But you can hire a crew of 20 surveyors and they will need half a day here to found somebody around who ever heard about Callcentric, Localphone, Circlenet,CWU, F9, VoIP. ms or anveo.
P.S. Even people who write articles in tech sections of the newspapers never heard about BYOD
Which just goes to show that even without GV+OBi people still wouldn't be running to the BYOD providers because they mostly never heard of them. Callcentric and Future-Nine still wouldn't be buying ads on network TV if GV didn't exist.