I signed up for Google Voice the other day when I checked out their international calling rates. They had calls to Jakarta for 3 cents a minute or calls to Indonesian cell phones for 11 cents a minute. Cheaper than Skype and about on par with calling cards.
I tried to make my first calls today though and I am a little disappointed. First I tried to call my girlfriend’s cell phone and would get 1 ring and a dead tone. This happened on 3 separate occasions.
After giving up on her cell, I tried to call her hotel room. While the call went through this time the quality was pretty horrible. There was way too much compression that made it quite difficult to understand the other person and way too much lag introduced. It made having a conversation pretty hard … heck, it made getting the front desk person to understand who I was calling for pretty hard.
Besides internationally, I also used Google Voice to try to get a callback from waiting on hold today. While I eventually received the call, it too had some compression (not as obvious but still something I noticed). It was generally ok but not as good quality as other VoIP services I’ve used (like Skype, Vonage, cable phones).
Since I’m already paying for other phone services, I don’t know why I’d want to use Google Voice at all. I guess I’ll try it for a while longer but as the title said, this is my first impression.
July 27th, 2010 at 8:22 am
Tried it again and it still sucked. Lag is the real killer with international calls.
I can’t recommend it at all.
August 12th, 2010 at 7:16 am
The three times I’ve used Skype I was impressed, but I don’t what the rates/fee structure is as I was using a friend’s account. Funny story: I tried to do some volunteer work in the summer of 2008 and when I was asked to make calls, I sat down by the phone with my list, and they said, “you can’t use the phone, use your Skype account.” When I said I didn’t have a Skype account, and asked if there was a business account or something, the deluded fools were dumbstruck. They acted like Skype was one of those things that everyone uses. They also asked me to use my personal email account for the work they wanted me to do, so I gave them a polite list of generally-accepted business protocols that they were violating, and walked.