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Google Voice Opens To All

Posted by kdawson on from the is-this-the-party-to-whom-i-am-speaking dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google Voice is now open to anyone in the US, removing the need to search for an invite. At the Google Voice site, anyone with a US IP address and a US phone number can sign up for an account. Non-US IPs are blocked, and non-US-based phone numbers are prevented from attaching to Google Voice (with the single odd exception of the 403 area code of southern Alberta)." Good timing on the part of Frontier Communications Corp., which just filed a lawsuit claiming that the Google Voice feature connecting a user's home, work, and cell phone numbers to another number infringes one of their patents.

1 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. It's good but it could be great by eudaemon · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Grandcentral had consensus-based call filtering; numbers flagged by enough people as undesirable got added to a blacklist anyone could subscribe to and Google took it out, which is a shame. Google voice still has trouble turning off some call presentation features - for instance pressing "4" to toggle call recording. Every time you receive a call from an automated system that requires a 4 as input GV just eats the digit. They also removed SIP call handling for anyone but Gizmo 5, another damn shame. Having said that, it is free except for international calls and those are pretty cheap.

    On the upside they already handle texting, making those $20/mo unlimited texting plans redundant. Now we just need EU-like cell plans where "caller pays" and we'd be all set - you can complete google voice calls as inbound to yourself via the mobile and full web pages. Oddly the Android client doesn't offer this feature.