*For cell phone users.
Too much hype has been made about Google Voice being free. As a poor sap who just got a bill this morning for $140 *over* my regular monthly bill from T-Mobile, I can tell you that Google Voice calls are not free. Google Voice calls are calls to an intermediary phone number (in my case, one in Palm Springs) that count against your plan’s minutes. T-Mobile charged me for every minute over my “included” minutes. And I went way over my minutes because I thought that my Google Voice calls didn’t count against my minutes. Boy was I wrong.
Upon further investigation, I found that you could use Google Voice to make unlimited calls if you added your GV number to a carrier plan that allowed you to make unlimited calls to a select few numbers– plans like My Circle, Friends & Family, A-list, and MyFaves. I don’t know about other carriers, but guess what? T-Mobile doesn’t offer MyFaves anymore. So your only option for “unlimited calls” is a more expensive unlimited calling plan. And if you pay for that, then what’s the point of using Google Voice?
Google Voice provides some advantages over calls made the regular way, such as the ability to record calls (with the other party’s knowledge), the ability to send and receive SMS (not MMS) without it counting against your text limits (if you don’t already have an unlimited text plan), the ability to receive voice mails over the Internet and have them transcribed for you (as long as you don’t mind that Google is mining your messages for consumer data about you), and the ability to have both your cell phone and home phone ring when someone calls your Google Voice number. All those features may be worth it to you if you understand that Google mines every word in your phone calls, text messages, and voice mails. But as a way to save money? No, sir, no, ma’am. Google Voice calls are NOT free.
Google Voice is not a VoIP service. If you want that, get Skype. That’s what I might do now that I’ve learned my hundred-and-forty-dollar lesson.
Pingback: The Technoverse Blog | Gmail Voice: Big Deal. No, Really It is a Big Deal! |
Rob, I don’t know about the iPhone, but your summary of GV on cell phones sounds right. I still haven’t tried to find a Vonage app for Android.
Briefly restating the facts as I understand them:
Currently, placing domestic US calls on a cellphone using Google Voice causes it to dial out to a local number to connect the call. Thus, your cellphone charges are the same as making a local call.
If you want to make free domestic US calls on your cellphone over wifi, currently, the Vonage app does this and works well for me.
If you want to make free domestic US calls on your cellphone over 3G, I’ve read there are hacks on unlocked iPhones to trick apps into treating the 3G connection like the wifi connection.
I know, but as I said, T-Mobile stopped offering MyFaves on new plans a while ago. I just looked it up, and EnGadget says T-Mobile stopped offering MyFaves in early November 2009. My only option at this point would be to switch to an unlimited plan, in which case there wouldn’t be much reason to use Google Voice unless I wanted to record calls, which I don’t, or screen calls, which I already do by looking at the Caller ID.
Well my friend since you are using t-mobile you could virtually make free calls including your cell minutes. If you have t-mobiles 5 favorites. Then you make your google voice number one of your five favorites and then make sure all incoming calls from your google voice come in as your google voice number (it’s under settings). Then those minutes aren’t counted against you.
Excellent post, Daniel. I think the people giving you a hard time just like to flame and nitpick. If you make a Google voice call from the Google Voice application on your cell phone, it still uses your carrier’s minutes. Period. They are not free. You will be charged. As far as I know now, there is no good free VoIP solution for making a free call from your mobile phone over the wifi or 3G network (i.e. using my unlimited data plan for $30/month from Verizon to make “free” calls). I believe that is the basis of what you (very clearly, in my opinion) are saying and don’t mind the flamers … there are a**holes in every corner of the internet. Civility in inversely proportional to anonymousness.
Perhaps I should limit my remarks to Google Voice on cell phones. On cell phones, you can generally call any number in the U.S. for the same cost as dialing locally, and all voice minutes regardless of distance are counted toward the number of minutes allotted in your plan. In the case of cell phones, Google Voice calls are not free.
Some sources on the Internet compare Google Voice to Skype, Vonage, and VoIP. This may be true for landline phones when you can get Google Voice to call back to your landline phone so that a long distance call is billed as a local call. My landline provider gives me unlimited local calling, so if I used Google Voice for long distance calls on my land line phone, they would be free.
The problem is when it comes to cell phones. Yes, there was a time when you could make unlimited Google Voice calls if you had a “friends & family” plan or whatchamacallit. Unfortunately, the cell phone carriers have apparently caught on to this money drain, and they no longer offer these plans. (I tried to get one from T-Mobile but I was too late.) Based on what I had read on the Internet saying that Google Voice was VoIP, I thought that the Android Google Voice app was VoIP. I learned after the first month of service that it wasn’t. So, for cell phone users who don’t have unlimited voice or friends & family plans, Google Voice calls are not free.
I have nothing against Google or Google Voice. If you are making free Google Voice calls on your landline, more power to you. I just want to caution that installing Google Voice on your cell phone won’t give you free calls. The only point of using Google Voice on a cell phone is to screen incoming calls and have your voice mails transcribed. And, yes, Google Voice SMS is free. So certainly there are some benefits to using Google Voice on a cell phone. I just wouldn’t want anyone else to make the same mistake I did and get a higher-than-normal phone bill because they think that Google Voice calls are free.
Google Voice domestic, U.S. calls are free. Anything to the contrary is patently false.
Whether or not you are billed for airtime by way of your cell company has to do with you and them, not Google Voice.
Yeah, really, the hostility surprises me too. And I’m sorry if I played into it. It’s a lot easier, though, for a person to write five hateful words on someone else’s blog without a link to their name than it is to write a blog post in the first place. If someone wants to write a cogent argument to refute my original argument, I welcome the respectful exchange of ideas. What I won’t tolerate is people’s use of my blog to denigrate what I write without offering anything useful of their own.
Now, on to Ed. I don’t know if you noticed, but the article you linked to is precisely the article I linked to in the word “free” in the first sentence of my post. The reason I linked to it is because the article is, perhaps innocently, deceptive. The PC Mag author says that domestic long-distance calling is free with Google Voice. Well, I can call any number in the U.S. for the same price with my T-Mobile voice plan, but that doesn’t mean it’s “free.” As soon as I go over the allotted minutes in my rate plan, all those minutes are charged the same, no matter whether they are long-distance or local.
And the PC Mag author is just wrong when he lumps Google Voice in with “a number of voice-over-the-Internet and call-back technologies.” As I said in my post, I found out the hard way that Google Voice is not VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol or “voice-over-the-Internet” as the PC Mag author put it). If Google Voice were VoIP, it would work over my WiFi connection at home when I took out my SIM card. It does not. And, if Google Voice carried my calls “over-the-Internet” then T-Mobile would not count Google Voice minutes in my rate plan. It is just plain silly to call Google Voice free in any way. Google Voice calls are no more free than any other call you make on your cell phone.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2355955,00.asp
i think the answer is right there
wow.. so much hostility. So Is it free or not?
MORON!
The calls ARE free!
BUT your provider charges you as normal minutes DUH!!!! you stupid mother fucker!
IF google voice wasn’t free GOOGLE would bill you!
fucking idiot
Thanks, Kimberly.
Scott, I’m smart enough to know that I was in very good company thinking that Google Voice calls were free. It is a widely held misconception.
And I don’t appreciate your tone. I don’t write my blog for know-it-alls. I write my blog posts for the many people who actually benefit from them. The last time I had a know-it-all comment on one of my blog posts, my advice turned out to be viewed by almost a thousand people and generated over twenty comments on Flickr (so far). Just as there are many people who don’t know how to write their own hyperlinks, there are many people who think Google Voice calls are free. If you can’t appreciate the sharing of vital information with people who can use it, then you might as well take your smart ass to another blog.
Are you really that stupid?
Good advice!
Of course, this is coming from someone who only just realized that *69 on the telephone is a fee service. Duh.