[olug] Asterisk and looking for SIP provider suggestions.

[Luke-Jr]

On Tuesday, November 23, 2010 10:55:24 am Kevin wrote:
> Why don't you like Google?

In general, because Google is evil. :p

> Do you have any experience with Google Voice yourself, or are you basing
> your opinion of them on what others had to say?
> Have you had reliability, continuity, or stability problems?

I use Google Voice for my primary origination service (that's "incoming phone 
calls" in layman's terms). They periodically change how their "follow me" 
"feature" (which can't be disabled) works, often breaking my PBX's attempt to 
always accept every call (and handle it my way). But even when they're not 
changing stuff, it's probably only 90% reliable. On top of that, with their 
current "follow me" behaviour, my phone system is forced to wait at least 4 
seconds (1 ring) before accepting the call and moving on to ring my real 
phones. Since my actual cell service (Sprint) takes 4-8 seconds (1-2 rings) 
before the phone rings, I often only have 4 seconds (1 ring) before the caller 
gives up. In the end, it doesn't cost me anything, so I can't *really* 
complain too much. But if I needed a reliable phone service, it would /not/ be 
Google Voice. (On the bright side, Google Voice *can* be configured to ring 
your phones directly if they have assigned PSTN DIDs, which provides a kind of 
failover when their SIP stuff doesn't work)