Comments on: Google Voice Now Lets You Bring Your Own Number

By: John Pugh

John Pugh — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 04:41:48 +0000

I use GV and my biggest problem with it is the latency on calls on my mobile phone (AT&T). However, GV calls over a landline is fine so I couldn’t seriously consider porting until latency is addressed.

Any other GV users experience the same issue?

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:12:22 +0000

No can do Bob. Per Google, you can currently get one GV number per Google account. http://www.google.com/support/voice/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=115136

By: Bob

Bob — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 16:03:02 +0000

Can you obtain more than one GV number? I would like to have local number AND an “office” number when I am on-site working. I would pay a small fee for this.

By: Ryan Kim

Ryan Kim — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:12:23 +0000

Good points. Yeah, after the ETF is dealt with, i think this will be attractive for a lot of people. Some like to keep their GV number separate but many i think would like to migrate to GV with their existing mobile number.

By: Diablo

Diablo — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:53:53 +0000

“Also, a user’s existing Google Voice number will go away after 90 days.”

Well, that’s a no go for me then. I’ve been using my GV number for over a year now and don’t want to lose that either. Would be great if both the number you port and your existing GV number would stay active under the same account.

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 18:52:20 +0000

I use GV for my (home) office phone. I don’t want to use my cell phone number for that — keeping it separate allows me to use the timer feature of GV so business calls go to voice mail after office hours, and no one is calling my home or cell phone about work stuff.

By: gzino

gzino — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:53:00 +0000

Ryan, fair points but I’d characterize those as short-term hurdles. After contract (to avoid ETF), why not migrate to Google Voice? Huge advantages in getting control of your number as well as the Google Voice features. Any downside?

More generically this is good step towards true unified communications (not the vendor definition) which includes separating pipes, providers and services. Rant here for folks interested:
http://nextblitz.com/blog/google-voice-number-porting/

By: Kevin C. Tofel

Kevin C. Tofel — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:41:09 +0000

I totally agree with you Tom, but I think that would be a challenge under the current system. I passed an under contract iPhone 3GS down to my daughter last year, but wanted to port the number of it out to another carrier and simply get a new number for my phone. I didn’t want to break nor renew my contract. You’d think it would be easy to just assign another number to the phone but because the contracts are tied to specific phone numbers, it took hours bewteen calls to customer service and trips to the local carrier store. I was repeatedly told they couldn’t do it because of the number change, which kills the contract. Eventually, I got it worked out, but the current system isn’t designed for the number swap. :(

By: tom

tom — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 14:19:57 +0000

what is actually needed is a way to flip/flop numbers, so that a cell number can become a GV number and a GV a cell number without cancelling the cell phone account.

or at least there should be an option that gets a new cell number issued instead of closing the account. i suppose this would require the working together of google and the various carriers.

By: Corinne Smith

Corinne Smith — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 09:40:30 +0000

You can port your number to Google Voice by going to: Google Voice –> Settings –> Voice Settings and select the port link.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Google Voice until now was that you had to use the number assigned to you by Google.