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.