As of today we're saving $45 per month by using Google Voice and an OBi VoIP bridge for our home phone!
If that's not a infomercial sounding beginning to a blog post, I don't know what is. But we are, and it was really easy to setup. If you're like us and you still have a land line, and you've been interested in how you can use Google Voice for your home phone, this post is for you.
Background
We're always on the lookout for ways to save a few dollars by altering our approach to normal things. And over the past few months we've been trying to take a critical look at our monthly spending in order to figure out which superfluous items can be eliminated from our monthly budget. When looking over our monthly expenses one of the first items we realized as a potentially unnecessary expense was our Comcast cable bill.
While dropping cable and joining the "cord cutter" movement is a possibility long term, we love TV and I don't see dropping cable anytime soon (though the new Dish Sling option is pretty appealing, and we'll see what Apple might offer in the next few months). However, the bundled services on cable seemed like it might be a good place to find some cost savings.
More specifically, I was looking at the $45 per month we were spending on our landline turned VoIP home phone service. Yes, that's right, $45 for the series of telemarketing, survey, political ad, occasional Microsoft Scammer, and periodic calls from our parents, grandparents, and other people from at least one generation older than us. In short, we were getting about 2-3 useful calls per month, and we were paying a lot for it.
I started to do a bit of research into the various options to drop our landline. Many of our friends don't have a landline any longer, and really the only reason we still had it was for our old security system that we replaced last year. So technically, we didn't really *need* our home phone. But our phone number has been our number since we bought our house 12 years ago, and we're sentimental and nostalgic and aren't ready to get rid of it.
Feeling a bit late to the party on dropping our land line, I started to research our options. Both while looking around online and while speaking with our technology informed friends, one option kept popping up over and over. It involved transferring our landline phone number to Google Voice and then using our existing Internet service for our phone, which includes free calling throughout the United States.
Perfect!
The Plan
In order to accomplish this Google Voice and Internet phone plan we'd need to purchase a few things and follow a series of steps. But our goal was simple, spend some money (about $70) and time (about 2-3 hours) up front and save ourselves $45 per month after that. The process was a series of simple steps.
- Check Phone Number Transfer Capability
- Purchase pre-paid "burner" phone or sim card and VoIP bridge
- Transfer your number to pre-paid phone
- Transfer your number to Google Voice
- Setup the OBi VoIP device
- Configure Google Voice
Step 1: Check Transfer Capability
The most important step in this whole process is the check to make sure your number can be ported.
Google Voice can only accept number ports from cell phone carriers, so you have to actually transfer your number twice during this whole process, once to a cell service and then once to Google Voice. So you need to make sure your number can be transferred to both the cell carrier and Google (since some, like Hawaii numbers, just won't work with Google Voice). So you'll want to check your number on the following two pages, one for the cell provider and one for Google Voice.
First let's check to be sure your number can be handled by Google Voice.
If check your number and it says that something like "Ooops! We currently don't support porting from your carrier. We apologize and are working on adding support for more carriers," that's good news. It means that once your number is on a supported carrier, such as AT&T or Sprint, you'll be able to port your number over to Google Voice.
However, if the check says something like "Ooops! This number appears to be from an area we don't currently support," that's bad news. It means that even if you can port your number to a supported carrier, you might not be able to transfer the number into Google Voice. You might still be able to do something that works for you, but Google Voice is not your answer...sorry.
If you're still in the game from the Google check, let's take a look at whether we can port your number to a carrier.
If this tells you that your number is "Eligible for Transfer," you're good to go onto the next step. And if you prefer to use a different intermediate carrier, you can check your eligibility on their websites as well.
If everything looks good and you get a favorable message, from both then you're ready to move full speed ahead.
Step 2: Purchase a pre-paid "Burner" Phone
In the vain of Scandal or The Wire, we bought a cheap pre-paid or pay-as-you-go cell phone and plan. The purpose of this phone is to act as a middle man in the transfer process. Since you need a cell carrier to have the number you're moving able to move to Google Voice, we need to first get the number to this "burner" phone. We got a great deal on a $9.99 flip phone that I plan to resell on eBay when we're all said and done, but a sim card will work just as well if you already have an unlocked phone.
Just about any cell carrier will work, and really if you already have an unlocked phone laying around, I'd just purchase a SIM card for your favorite carrier so you don't need the whole burner phone, but where's the fun in that? If you are buying a sim card, just be sure it's the right size and type to work with your unlocked phone.
I feel cool like Olivia Pope
In our case, we're familiar with AT&T and they had a good deal for a $9.99 no commitment GoPhone that would be perfect for our needs. We bought the GoPhone and entered in the information necessary to begin the number porting process.
Step 3: Transfer Number to Pre-Paid Phone
This is a bit of step 2a since the porting begins during the purchase process for our phone.
To begin porting your number you'll need to provide your phone number to be ported, your information, as well as the PIN code associated with securing your phone number. In our case we had to log into Comcast's website and determine where to find our PIN. Though it's referenced in several locations, on Comcast's website it's hidden in the equivalent to "under a rock in the corner of the forest." If you're a Comcast customer, look for a link on the very right under the My Account section, Users & Preferences tab, that says "View Voice Security PIN."
Once the phone is purchased and number porting has begun, it will take between one and five business days to complete the port. When you receive your phone in the mail it's best to call AT&T to ask for a number port status. If more than five days pass without confirmation the number is returned to your normal phone provider and the port will fail and you'll need to start over. By calling you can make sure the port keeps moving along.
After the port is successful your burner or unlocked phone will be able to make and receive calls from your ported landline number.
In our circumstance I was able to sign up for the GoPhone plan that is a pay as you go $0.10 per minute. I found conflicting information about having to fund the plan ahead of time, but I ultimately found a support person in AT&T who was willing to active the account without adding any funds.
And if TV has taught me anything, after getting the confirmation call on your burner phone that the number port is successful, you should immediately break the phone in half and throw it in the trash so the people who are tracking you can't find you.
Step 4: Port Your Number to Google Voice
Once your cell phone has your number, you can immediately begin the porting process over to Google Voice, no need to wait.
The Google Voice process is quite simple. You just fill out all of the info in their number port form. The one thing that got me popped up when I needed to provide my new AT&T GoPhone's account number. AT&T doesn't display your account number anywhere on the website or from the phone, you have to call customer service to get your account number. And before you ask, no, it's not the same as your phone number, it's a separate and distinct account number. But a quick call to AT&T resolved this issue and I was on my way.
In order to port your number over to Google Voice you have to pay a one time $20 fee to cover the process. If you're counting along, so far we've spent $29.99 including the burner phone. After filling out the information it will go into a pending state on Google where you'll be able to check the status on the port until it is complete.
Step 5: Setup the OBi VoIP Bridge
Okay, at this point you've got your number transfer started and you're waiting the prerequisite business days for the various ports to finish. Now you'll need to purchase an OBi device to support the final transition of your landline to a VoIP service that uses your internet connection and Google Voice.
If you do a quick search on Amazon you'll see there are several different VoIP device options from OBi, as well as other brands. Each has a different price point and different set of features, from multiple ports to support for fax machines. After looking over everything we decided we only needed the most basic single port option, the OBi100 VoIP Bridge
. It offers a single port for connecting to our phone.
In our case we're able to place it in our basement where all of our phone lines are run and can wire in as many phones as we need to through a split panel. But our situation is unique because of how we've wried up our house. In your situation you'll likely just install it where your main phone line comes into the house, or where your cable modem sits.
However, if you'd like to install the device somewhere other than near your phone line or cable line, you can buy one of the OBi200
or OBi202
model and actually hook up a small OBiWiFi Adapter
into your OBi which allows you to pretty much connect it anywhere in your house.
Regardless of what you choose, you should be able to hook up the OBi into your network and phone line by simply plugging in a few items, and you're well on your way.
Though the cost of the OBi will vary based on the version your purchase, we spent about $40 for it so we're at $69.99, and that's all we'll have to spend.
Step 6: Setup Google Voice for VoIP
The final step in the process is the setup of Google Voice to work with the OBi VoIP device. OBi has an excellent guide that walks you through the whole setup process, but it's all done on their OBiTalk.com website. The key component to the configuration is setting up Google Voice as one of your OBi's two lines (the other being an e-911 service I'll mention in the next section).
Other than this basic step, there are a ton of small configuration items you can tweak in your OBi.
And in case you're wondering, Officer Barbrady is the name I gave my OBi device. All of our home's various network devices are Southpark characters. It's been that way since 2000. And yes, Kenny is a computer that's died many times.
Conclusion/Considerations
There are a few things to note about this whole process. While it was all pretty straight forward to accomplish, it did take a few hours of effort in figuring out some of the various oddities. But once it was all setup, it all just worked.
One thing that's really nice about the whole setup is how you can forward your Google voice calls to multiple devices. If someone calls on our home phone number, it rings through to my cell phone, alerts me on my computer, rings on our home phone, and leaves a notification in various places if the call was missed.
While the notifications feel a bit like WUPHF from The Office at first, Google Voice has a lot of great features to help you streamline the process, including number blocking forwarding options, and built in voicemail. After a little more tinkering we're now to a point where only the numbers that we want to get through actually ring to us.
But what about our old phone account, don't we have to cancel it? In our case, after porting our phone number from our Comcast account, I checked our account a day or two later and our phone service had been automatically cancelled. No need to call and argue about why you're canceling the account or anything, it was great! Not only that, but we got a pro-rated credit since we cancelled in the middle of the billing cycle. Each individual service many be different, so be sure to double check
I have read a few concerns about Google Voice no longer supporting XMPP, the protocol that enables VoIP call forwarding that makes the whole system work, and while they were supposed to drop it in 2012, they reversed their decision and kept it in place with official support for OBi being extended in late 2014. This is ultimately what led me to trust this approach as a long term home phone solution. It's true they could drop it at any time, but it seems unlikely given the adoption rate of users using this same approach. More likely would be the possibility that Google begins charging a small fee to keep the feature up and running on an individual account. I could see an annual charge happening in the future, though nothing has been discussed.
While this is all pretty great, the big disadvantage to this whole approach to home phone is the need for power for your phone to function. If you were using a standard copper land line (not VoIP of any sort) and your power goes out, your corded phone still typically works. But since this requires your internet stay up, which means your cable modem, router, and any other devices remain online, you'll need a battery backup to make sure everything stays up and running during power flickers if you're concerned about that. However, with cell phones available, this likely isn't as big of a deal.
And the final major consideration with this type of number port is 911 service. Since you're no longer using a local phone company or service provider, the 911 routing won't work the same, since your call's point of origin is unknown. The way around this is simple, there are multiple e-911 services for this very scenario. You sign up for the service and pay a small annual fee of $10-$20 and enter your local address information. Then you add the e-911 service to your OBi VoIP bridge and anytime you dial 911 the service will route your call to the correct local 911 dispatch. OBi has actually partnered with a service that comes built into their interface. It's call Anveo and is $15 per year. We went ahead and use it as a service due to the ease of setup and configuration in the device. And at this point, the $15 per year will be our only recurring charges for phone.
So when all was said and done we have unlimited calling within the United States on our original phone number completely free of charge. International calling does require credit in Google Voice but the rates are very reasonable. However, we'll just likely use our cell phone for any international calls. We ended up paying about $70 up front and $15 per year for the whole service, so after using it for just two months we'll already be saving money. And best of all, with Google's integration on everything else I already use (Gmail, Docs, Drive, etc), it feels pretty seamless across all of our stuff.
If your considering the switch to using Google Voice as your new home phone, we hope our experience and guide will be useful in helping you transition. And while there are lots of variables and options out there, this is what has worked well for us. Best of luck and we'd love to hear your experiences or questions if you make the switch.
