Sticking with Traditions
Introduction to Skype
Welcome to Google
- Choose a new U.S phone number or port your existing number($20 one-time fee) https://support.google.com/voice/answer/1065667?hl=en
- Receive Call/Text/Voicemail (on your home phone, yes texting)
- Call anywhere in the U.S and Canada for free
- No more number change when your phone is turned off or not working. Just simply forward your google number to your real phone number.
- 15GB storage limit
- Available on the web for you to check call history(Incoming, outgoing, missed), text, and voicemails.
- Voicemail configuration (Everyone gets to listen to the same voicemail or different greeting depending on group assignments
Here comes Vonage to the rescue
ObiTalk or Ooma
Note from Obihai/ObiTalk:
http://blog.obihai.com/2013/10/important-message-about-google-voice.html
Recently Google announced the end of support for XMPP based calling with Google Voice. This will happen on May 15, 2014 – that’s over 6 months from today. Since your OBi device uses XMPP to communicate with Google servers, the end of support will directly impact how your OBi device can be used with your Gmail account and its associated Google Voice phone number. Unfortunately, you will no longer be able to use the Google Voice communication service to make calls using the phone connected to your OBi device. Also, the ability to receive calls to your Google Voice number, directly from Google’s service, will not be possible.
Note from Google:
https://plus.google.com/+NikhylSinghal/posts/MjyncJEbzxK
This in turn affects integration with Google voice which is what we wanted which rules out ObiTalk. Someone told me that another person had a device that they purchased from Costco and only pays taxes on the device monthly. We search the Costco website and found Ooma. Did some reseach and was impressed with their device. We were also scared about this google cut off date but Ooma brought us assurance by addressing the issue below.
Note from Ooma:
http://www.ooma.com/node/1420
A number of companies sell adapters to connect a standard telephone to a computer or network so you can make calls over the Internet. A handful of these companies have configured their adapters so phones become exclusively powered by Google Voice to make free calls. This violates Google’s terms of service, which forbids outside companies from using Google Voice to run their phone service.
Since the Ooma Google Voice Extensions feature is merely a perk for our customers who want to keep their Google Voice phone number – and not what powers our phone service – it’s compliant with Google’s terms of service and won’t be affected in any way by the Google crackdown.
So with that said we went ahead and purchased the Ooma telo with one Linx device for $200 + taxes. Now we have 3 phone lines. I got one by registering for a free Ooma phone number, and another when I upgraded to the Ooma Premier which offers us the Google voice integration, and another because we chose to add another line so that my girlfriend and I have our own phones and we know who is calling for who.
This works great because our number stays on Google and that is what we give out. We can switch between providers or lose our Ooma service and won't have to worry about losing our number or porting issue. Our friends and family won't have to remember a new number for us. Depending on which phones we call from in our home the respective Google voice number will appear on the outgoing caller ID. We could also dial the (**1 or **2) before the number and that will also change to the appropriate outgoing caller ID. This works so well for us we decided to share our experience with Ooma.
Even more savings with Ooma
http://www.ooma.com/products/taxes-fees
Also let me emphasize that there is NO MONTHLY CHARGE for the Ooma basic service. You are only responsible for paying a monthly FCC, state, and local tax on your device. To only pay $3.74 per month for home phone is a killer deal to me. Please email us if you have any questions about this article at [email protected].
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