Google Announces Fiber Phone, a $10/Month Home Telephone Service

Google on Tuesday announced Fiber Phone, a home phone service for Fiber subscribers. For $10 a month, Fiber Phone offers unlimited local and nationwide calling, and "the same affordable rates as Google Voice for international calls." From company's blog post: You can keep your old phone number, or pick a new one. You can use call waiting, caller ID, and 911 services just as easily as you could before. Fiber Phone can also make it easier to access your voicemail -- the service will transcribe your voice messages for you and then send as a text or email. Writing for TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey explains why this matters: Fiber Phone features unlimited calls to the U.S., call filtering and blocking, voicemail transcription, and call forwarding to your mobile so you don't miss that telemarketer. It may seem an anachronism, but if Google aims to be the main or even sole conduit for communication in the areas it is expanding to, it does have to offer this.

Comments

Filter our telemarketers

[InterGuru]

Sign up for nomorobo.com. It's free service that blocks telemarketers

From their website

Nomorobo uses a feature known as "Simultaneous Ring". When simultaneous ring is enabled, your phone will ring on more than one number at the same time. The first device to pick it up gets the call and the other phones stop ringing.

So, when the Nomorobo number is enabled as a simultaneous ring number it is the first number to screen the call. If it’s a legitimate call, the call goes through to your number. If the call is an illegal robocaller, Nomorobo intercepts the call and hangs up for you. Your phone will ring once letting you know that the robocall has been answered and stopped.

Re:Filter our telemarketers

[chihowa]

The first thing I think when I hear "free service" is to wonder how I am really paying for this service. This company will have complete logs of all of your incoming calls, which could be worth something to somebody. They claim otherwise, though.

From their site:

How Does Nomorobo Stay In Business?
The service is free for consumers but business and public safety organizations pay to license the data. For consumers, robocalls are annoying. But, for businesses it costs them real money. And, for EMS systems (like 911), it could be a matter of life and death.

These are the people that don't mind paying for the service and using it directly in their telephone equipment.

Google announces another product they wont sell me

[netsavior]

I would love to buy fiber, but like 95% of the country, NOPE. Yay another add-on feature I can't buy.

Re:$10/month plus

[fonos]

I take it you've never seen a Google Fiber bill before. This is how mine looks:

Gigabit Ethernet $70.00
Taxes, Fees, Surcharges $0.00
Total: $70.00

Great news, for parts of 3 cities

[NotDrWho]

If you happen to live in the right neighborhood of one of the 3 cities that has any Google fiber, then hooray!

For the rest of you, don't hold your breath.

Re:Separating first and third worlds

[NotDrWho]

At they rate they've been deploying it so far, it should be in every major U.S. market by the year 2216.

This should be free

[mrchaotica]

(And by "free" I mean at no additional cost beyond the Google Fiber internet service itself.)

After all, Google already offers Google Voice / Hangouts for free. I assume that this is just Google Voice plus an ATA -- essentially the same thing lots of people already do using an ObiTalk, just entirely Google-branded.

Re:This should be free

[crow]

I use an Obi, and I would agree except for a few things. The service they're offering is roughly equivalent to using an Obi with their premium subscription service. Google Fiber Talk customers get caller ID and other features that you don't get directly with Google Voice.

Google will also allow you to port your land line over, which they won't with Google Voice (you have to first port it to a mobile, so it can be done if you're really determined). They also provide E911 service, which is not part of Google Voice. There are add-on services you can use with Google Voice for $1/month to get E911, or you can just map 911 to your local emergency dispatch number (knowing they won't automatically get your address that way).

Our "land" line is VoIP with an Obi (I highly recommend it), but we use voip.ms specifically because it will send Caller ID names from my address book. We don't have enough minutes in monthly calling to make the Obi subscription service make sense or we would switch.

Google will be happy to sell it to you

[rsilvergun]

Just as soon as you do something about the schmucks running your state legislature. Oh, and get Citizens United over turned while you're at it. Our nation's political decisions have consequences, and this is one of them.

When I get off the phone

[future assassin]

will online ad tracking now show me ads relating to what I was talking about on the phone?

Re:Fire Phone?

[msmash]

Oops. Have fixed it now -- thanks for pointing it out!

Re:Separating first and third worlds

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Good, that means it should be available in my small town in Canada by the year 5940.

Re:Why so expensive?

[JackieBrown]

Oh right, USA. I keep forgetting that you guys get fleeced for phone service.

What does it cost elsewhere?

Re:$10/month plus

[Shatrat]

Technically it is both POTS and VOIP. There are plenty of people doing POTS from ONTs, with SIP on the network side. I'm sitting in a lab full of them. To the user it's an old school 2 wire POTS line. On the network it's just SIP traffic on a separate VLAN. However, Google currently uses some kind of home grown ONT that's just a simple single Ethernet port encapsulated onto the GPON WAN. More complex ONTs can do POTS, Ethernet, T1s and RF video from a single device.

From the Google FAQ

Can I use my existing home phone hardware with Fiber Phone?
Yes. Fiber Phone includes a conventional phone jack that’s compatible with nearly all home phones. Please note that rotary dial phones and some older push-button phones do not work with Fiber Phone.

Re:Why so expensive?

[Rob Lister]

And looking at the fine print we see

$9.99 for 12-Months
Plus taxes & fees, with 1-year agreement.

The taxes and fees are going to be ~$12, itemized ...

Taxes
Communications Sales Tax $1.67
Federal Excise Tax* $0.91
E911 Tax* $0.75
Total Taxes $3.33

Fees and Surcharges
FCC Access Charge $6.41
Carrier Cost Recovery Fee $1.49
Federal Universal Service Fund* $1.44
Total Fees and Surcharges $9.34
Total Telephone Taxes, Fees and Surcharges $12.67

So call it a spade and say ~$22 a month. Which is still ~$10 less than I pay ISP for my phone service, but it only lasts a year, and then it is the same price as my current phone service. And certainly not as good as my current phone service, given my experience with listening to the [sometimes very] garbled reception I hear when talking on the phone to those that have it.