FOOD FOR THOUGHT Google Voice to what?

[ccwtech]

I've been using PIAF with the special Vitelity plan. My outgoing calls go through Google Voice since outgoing is charged with Vitelity (at a small rate however).

Google voice has recently (for me) become very unreliable to call out. Some numbers I call just ring forever and when I call using the Vitelity Trunk or my cell phone, they work. Other times I get "All circuits are busy".

I'm wondering if I should replace Google Voice with some of the options on this forum or just use Vitelity for outbound. I've got a relatively small amount of placed calls (about 12 hours per month).

I UNDERSTAND that there is no 'correct' answer. I'm just looking for feedback and suggestions.

Thanks in advance for your help!

 

[Chris Sweeney]

It is really just up to what do you want to pay? You already have Vitelity setup so why not just use them? If you want a backup provider you could go with Flowroute or Voip.ms incase Vitelity was having an issue you would have an alternative route. If you were talking 1000/s of hours of calls and where looking for the best way to do this it would be a different story but for what little use you say you have, it's really not that big a deal. Even at 1 cent per minute you are only talking $7/month for your usage.

 

[ccwtech]

Thanks Chris. I think you are right... with my call volume the time it would take me to save money would be worth more than $7.00 per month. Sometimes it can be expensive to be so cheap! Vitelity works well.

 

[bobkoure]

...more than $7.00 per month...

That's assuming you found a DID provider that was free. GV was actually pretty good, considering the price.

I've moved all my outbound calls to Vitelity. Sounds fine. Not expensive enough to even think about (I use maybe half the phone time you do).
I've been putting off porting my GV number because... Hmmm... mostly because the GV SMS solution is better than what I can do otherwise. Vitelity has s.ms, which isn't terrible but is a bit clunky. For instance, you can only send SMSs to addresses on your buddies list. OK. How do you get all your names and numbers into that list? Type them in, one at a time (old skool). I've asked if they can do a CSV import, but no response. Vitelity can also forward SMSs to an email address (which you can then forward to, say, your cell phone - and keep a copy in a folder or separate email box).

 

[tycho]

I've been tinkering with outbound providers anticipating losing my free GV calling in May. Unlike many folks, however, I have been having absolutely zero problems with my GV outbound calling. Of, course, I pulled the GV trunk off my PBX almost a year ago and have been using only my Obi100 for that purpose (connected directly to my home in-wall twisted-pair wiring).

I tried the "Obivoice" monthly trial and it was great, but I've let it lapse pending arriving at the May date. I've tried Localphone and it is uber-cheap ($0.005/minute), allows tiny infusions of cash, but has some dialing and CID display quirks. I beta tested CheapvoipInc and it is great and very inexpensive. I'm just now trialing Circlenet and it, too, is very cheap and seems to work well. I've kept my primary VoIP providers: Callcentric has my main DID but <cheap bastard mode on> at almost 2 cents/minute for outbound it is twice the price of everyone else so I never use it for outcalls. Callwithus is my other long-standing provider and it is excellent. Good pricing but I use few minutes, don't want to fund it with a lot of cash, and therefore suffer a minor ding because of the "fee" to fund with smaller amounts via credit card and PayPal. I ressurected my old Seagate Dockstar, loaded up a fresh, current copy of Debian Wheezy and plain Asterisk from the repository and made it handle the "old-school" GV-via-callback mechanism that I used to use before the Marcus Brown XMPP module and then the Obi. It works fine, after delay during call set-up.

Many, many options!

 

[bobkoure]

Ah, yes, the quest for as-cheap-as-possible/free.
Some of us came to GrandCentral (then GVoice) for the functionality rather than the free service. Starting to feel like we were the minority...

 

[tycho]

Ah, yes, the quest for as-cheap-as-possible/free.
Some of us came to GrandCentral (then GVoice) for the functionality rather than the free service. Starting to feel like we were the minority...

Now don't get all snobish.

Some of us came to Grand Central (I was there)/Gizmo (long gone)/GV (starting using it in '09) simply as a hobby and didn't want to spend much $$ on (yet another) hobby. Some of us now wouldn't want to part with the functionality that we have grown accustomed to, even though it was a hobby. But finding the best possible service for the lowest price is also a time-honored hobby, and I have the time to indulge it.

Where it counts I have the best service for my needs. For the DID that my aged Mum calls, for example, I pay a top-tier provider with excellent reliability and failover, and it's all running off a hefty UPS with redundant wire/wireless ISPs. For that I willingly pop for unlimited inbound even though I really don't need it: with little difficulty I could reconfigure things to save a buck or two. But I don't.

But having over the years grown used to pick-up-the-phone-and-it-works (for free to boot) GV, who can blame me for indulging my hobby trying to replicate that. Me making casual calls is not production/mission-critical stuff ...

 

[bobkoure]

Not so much being snobbish as puzzling over why GV being discontinued isn't causing a flood of folks to asterisk (or maybe phonebooth.com) to get that same one-number-calls-all. Just now thinking that maybe that wasn't the attraction at all for most folks.

 

[tycho]

I hear you. But it's unclear that GV is "being discontinued." All we know is that XMPP is being phased out, and the Obi has been flatly told to stop interfacing with GV via XMPP on 5/15. Who knows? Maybe all the rest of GV will survive for a apell...

My thinking: GV alone provides cool functionality, and that attracted certain folks (you; me). Asterisk is daunting to many, and is not a direct replacement for GV for most. Obi, now =that= was an appliance (much easier to implement than PIAF), and it advertised free calling to boot. A completely different audience than either of the above.

 

[bobkoure]

Had a conversation this evening with a friend (very high tech guy - has started a number of successful companies). He said to me "A few months ago you mentioned that Google Voice is going away. Are you sure about that? I haven't heard anything at all about this from Google..."
So maybe part of the answer is that many folks don't know (yet) that it's either disappearing (XMPP) or morphing into something different (Hangouts). And maybe it isn't going away after all. As GV users we'd have heard from Google. Right? ...Right?
And maybe Ward's right, it's a train wreck in progress. Of all the ways to handle this, not telling your users well in advance seems the second worst (worst being just shut it off with no advance hint or blog piece or anything). They're gained a lot of good will with their "great minutes giveaway", but they may just be handling this in a way that will cause less overall good will than if they'd just not bought Grand Central in the first place. Sigh.

 

[visionlogic]

Of all the ways to handle this, not telling your users well in advance seems the second worst (worst being just shut it off with no advance hint or blog piece or anything).

For the "users" (in this case the users of the XMPP protocol), yes, this is true. But in the vastness of the Google techno-sphere they/we are a disposable minority. Of course, Google isn't a stranger at the "Evolve It Or Just Shut It Down Dance" either. Remember their list of shutdown projects - Lively, Google Answers, Dodgeball, Google Notebook, Google Buzz, Google Jaiku, Google Wave, Google Reader, iGoogle, Google Health, Knol, Picnik, Google Video Marketplace, Google Fast Flip, etc. Like a giant amoebic blob moving across the digital universe, one can not predict which part of its being will move in any given direction.

 

[Brian Simmons]

Google never said they were doing away with Google Voice. The obviously are doing away with XMPP. At this point, that means no third party support going forward. But Google Voice itself will still operate and as much as it can be woven into the Android Phone experience, I doubt that Google will ever drop it completely.

For those of us that use Google Voice for our primary cell phone number, everything will continue to work as normal. Callers into my GV number will still directly ring my cell phone going forward, and I will be able to make phone calls out of my cell phone using the Google Voice backbone.

 

[bobkoure]

For those of us that use Google Voice for our primary cell phone number, everything will continue to work as normal. Callers into my GV number will still directly ring my cell phone going forward, and I will be able to make phone calls out of my cell phone using the Google Voice backbone.

Do you mean "primary cell phone number" as in Sprint integration or as in forwarding to another number (or group of numbers)?
Not that it matters that much, but, without XMPP, there's a bit of back-flipping required to get a call to to go out with your GV number. Either, essentially, do what the GV web page does, or call GV / log in / select "make outgoing call" / enter number. The latter has the advantage of not needing a data connection. I had this latter mostly working (GV delays are not consistent) with Prefixer - advantage being it would work so long as I had a cell voice connection. When I find time, I'll probably do the same thing with my own PBX, DISA, and outbound on a Vitelty trunk (Vitelity allows CID spoofing - I just spoof my GV number).