When I first moved to the States from England three years ago, one of my first tasks was to ensure I had a viable way of calling my friends and family back home. It was around the time that Vonage was becoming really popular and unlimited calling within the US and back to the UK (among other places) for $24.95/month seemed like a great deal. And it was. It piggy-backed on your Internet connection, so there were monthly line service fees as there was with a conventional home phone.
So we’ve been using Vonage without issue for the past three years. They’re a great company, who had a great idea and really capitalized on it and provide a good service.
However, that was 2006. It’s now 2009 and we’ve seen, among other things, the advent of Google Voice. The idea behind Google Voice is to provide you with a single phone number (which you can choose yourself) and for it to act as a hub if you will, which takes incoming calls and routes them to all your existing phones (such as home, work, mobile) for you to pickup. Among other advantages is the ability to provide a single number to everyone, without the need to distinguish between friends, family or clients, as you can set up rules, which dictate how the call is handled depending on who calls you.
Since Google Voice is a Voice Over IP (VOIP) based system, it’s overheads are very low and in turn, not limited geographically. As such, I can call anyone in the world, at fairly decent rates. For instance, the main one I care about is calls to the UK – Calls to landlines are two cents a minute or 19 cents a minute to mobiles: even if I called home for an hour a week every week, that would cost less than $5 a month. Compare that to the $32 Vonage bill I have every month and it’s a no-brainer.
In an age where the mobile is king, usage of landlines is dwindling, to the point where many, myself included, are ditching their landlines in favour of using their mobile minutes.
With such services as Google Voice around, there’s now little excuse to keep a landline, even if you have a business / call internationally / spend all day at home. Makes sense to me.
Google Voice is still by invitation only. If you know someone who has GV, ask for an invitation, or request one directly from Google.
I'm a twentysomething British guy, currently living in Florida, having moved here in 2006 after meeting my wife. I love Google, efficiency, Wheat Thins, photography, things that just work (read: Apple products), indie films, hummus, Bill Bailey and spending time with my family and friends.