GC2GV: B4

May 23, 2009

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May you be in Heaven half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead – Irish toast

You may be wondering whether to make the move from GrandCentral to Google Voice.  The simple answer is, do it!

The #1 thing you’ll get is cheap international calls from your cell phone – with Google standing behind it. And you’ll get SMS support, voicemail message transcripts and conference calls.

But before you make the change, there’s a few things you should be ready for:

  • Your Contacts won’t automatically come over into Google Voice;
  • You can export your Contacts into Google Voice;
  • You can’t export customized greetings, phone settings and group settings.
  • Your Messages won’t come over into Google Voice;
  • You can’t export your Messages into Google Voice.

So before you move over, do the following:

  • Save or delete all your GrandCentral messages. (Access to them may stop suddenly someday, so dealing with them fully now is the only safe approach.)
  • Export your GrandCentral address book. Sign into GrandCentral; click the Address Book tab and click Export - choose CSV file; save the file to your desktop, or someplace else appropriate.

That’s it! You’re prepared. In the next post, I’ll describe how to get Google Voice set up quickly and easily.

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Posted by Bud Man

Is Google Voice VoIP?

May 7, 2009

Voice over IP – VoIP, as it’s properly abbreviated, though you’ll seevoip-megaphone2 VOIP a lot – is the future of phones.

Basically, VoIP means using the Internet – based on Internet Protocol, or IP – to carry phone calls.

Traditional phone networks use special circuits to protect voice traffic and maintain voice quality and reliability. They have, of course, evolved over the years – there are no more switchboard operators plugging wires into and out of sockets to connect calls, as there used to be! (As often seen in movies, most recently in Changeling with Angelina Jolie as an operator and supervisor; her free long-distance phone access plays a minor role in the plot.)

Internet Protocol is a simple set of rules for sending data over possibly unreliable connections – such as the phone network, which is unreliable for non-voice data as it wasn’t designed for it! In IP, data is divided up into chunks – “packetized” – sent over the line (or carrier pigeons or whatever), then re-assembled at the other end.

You can see that this takes time and would tend to introduce lags to digitize, send and re-assemble the packets. But, with use increasing and investments in infrastructure growing, the Internet is getting so much better and more reliable that it can reasonably be used to carry voice calls – thus, VoIP.

However – and we are still researching this – Google Voice is apparently a call redirection service rather than “true” VoIP. It uses phone lines to send analog voice signals, rather than IP packets, from one point to the next.

This is a bit disappointing to VoIP zealots but welcome to the rest of us, who should get better call quality as a result.

However, we’re still awaiting a detailed explanation of just how Google Voice works – and waiting for it to be available beyond the GrandCentral community and a few reviewers, as well!

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Posted by Bud Man