$10 + taxes and fees seems a bit steep, considering that Ooma is The other odd thing is that "We can’t bring Fiber Phone to everyone at the same time, so we’re doing it in phases.". Given how few fiber customers there are, I'm wondering why that is..
Google Fiber Phone
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Re: Google Fiber Phone
#12John Oliver called this two weeks ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU8dCYocuyI&feature=youtu.be...
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#13Wait....I thought adding a landline to your internet service magically made everything cheaper. What is Google doing wrong?
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#14I get that Google is doing this (Fiber) in order to improve internet service, which is in it's best interest. But I can't help but feeling like there is some other goal here.
Profit?
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#15Sort of weird that it's something they bothered with, considering home phones are on the out and out. Edit: That said, I'm sure there are still 100m Americans with phone service, but I don't know that the demographics of people who care to switch to google fiber and need phones are really that overlapping. Then again, Google probably researched this much more than I did. Just seems odd from my perspective.
Man, this site skews young! I just saw a smartwatch-related thread a couple of days ago, with half the comments indicating that no one wears a wristwatch. Today, no one has a home phone.
Forward-looking trends are what they are... but the overwhelming majority of the population is over 30. And that's the demographic with the overwhelming majority of income. Telephony is a pretty easy bolt-on for Google Fiber, especially since they already have the Google Voice infrastructure in place. So why wouldn't they?
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#16Or the hacker's solution to maintaining a landline: get yourself a cheap SIP-capable handset and an account with a wholesale SIP-trunking provider like Flowroute ($1.25/mo for the number, $.0098/min outbound to CONUS, $.012/min inbound).
Proxy through OpenVBX or Asterisk (can be hosted in the cloud or in your home) if you want to get fancy with voicemail, IVR menus, forwarding, extensions for different rooms in the house, etc.
ISP bundled phone services are essentially just packaging this for you with 10x markup. (I worked on VoIP installs for a summer when I was 14; it's not that hard).
Only downside is most of these phones anticipate PoE, so you need to buy the power supply (or a PoE injector) separately. You also have to trust yourself to set up E911 correctly, or keep your cell phone around for that.
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#17I get that Google is doing this (Fiber) in order to improve internet service, which is in it's best interest. But I can't help but feeling like there is some other goal here.
As I understand it, Fiber is run as if it were an independent company, trying to make a great product, and run at a profit.
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#18Or the hacker's solution to maintaining a landline: get yourself a cheap SIP-capable handset and an account with a wholesale SIP-trunking provider like Flowroute ($1.25/mo for the number, $.0098/min outbound to CONUS, $.012/min inbound). Proxy through OpenVBX or Asterisk (can be hosted in the cloud or in your home) if you want to get fancy with voicemail, IVR menus, forwarding, extensions for different rooms in the h…
But won't that fail at the same time your home internet access fails - when the ISP link goes down? I have a land line as a redundant link, for security.
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#19Sort of weird that it's something they bothered with, considering home phones are on the out and out. Edit: That said, I'm sure there are still 100m Americans with phone service, but I don't know that the demographics of people who care to switch to google fiber and need phones are really that overlapping. Then again, Google probably researched this much more than I did. Just seems odd from my perspective.
I still have a home phone, but it's an ObiTalk box that logs into my Google Voice account, so I don't pay anything for it. I actually prefer it over my cell phone because the call quality is much better.
Re: Google Fiber Phone
#20A landline phone service seems a bit anachronistic, but there is a place for it. The future of telephony is here, but it sucks. Many here on HN probably don't even remember this, but phone calls actually used to be intelligible. Before cell phones and VOIP, before packet-switching and aggressive digital compression, calls traveled over Ma Bell's glorious circuit-switched network. You could actually understand what pe…
Also anyone over 60 or so (super generalization) wants a landline. For evidence I give you my mother, my in-laws, and several parents of friends. Said friends, like me, would switch their parents to Google Fiber in a hot minute with or without their consent. So a landline offering makes sense, as without it, there's a sticking point. This helps make it more frictionless.