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Google Voice and Google Fi

Started by restamp, September 17, 2016, 09:09:47 PM

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restamp

A friend recently ported her home number to Google Voice and her cell number to Google Fi.  And then she ran into a problem:  Google does not allow GV numbers to be forwarding phones.  OK, fair enough.  But, they apparently lump Google Fi numbers in the same category.  Therefore, my friend could not set up her GV number to ring both her OBi at the house and her Fi number simultaneously.  This doesn't make sense to me:  It would appear this is precisely the market that Google claims to be catering to.  Can anyone explain why they would cripple their own cellular network?

(I was able to program the OBi to both ring the local ph1 line and forward the call to her Fi phone by crafting a special X_InboundCallRoute, but this is not ideal:  First, the latency is twice what it normally would be, making such a forwarded call painful to conduct, but also the calling number is not transmitted to the Fi phone.  Can anyone recommend a better solution?)

SteveInWA

Google Voice and Google's Project Fi use the same back-end infrastructure, so Fi numbers are essentially GV numbers.  You can't forward one GV number to another, because of all of the call-forwarding and text message forwarding included with each account's number.  It's a technical limitation, not a business decision.  Perhaps, in the future, Google will engineer a way around this, and they know it's on the "wish list" of features to be added.

See this for more information:  https://support.google.com/fi/answer/6159953

restamp

Thanks, Steve, for clarifying and verifying what I had suspected.

Boomshnka

I'm facing the same conundrum and was wondering if you would share the syntax of the X_InboundCallRoute you've created. I'v got GV on SP1 and have been trying the following, "{ph, sp1(XXXXXXXXXX)} but it's never ringing on my cell phone. Thanks.

drgeoff

Assuming that those ten Xs represent the actual digits of your cellphone number and you are not putting that opening " into the OBi, then you have the correct syntax for forking an incoming call to multiple endpoints.

But why do you claim to have the same conundrum as the OP? You are not trying to forward to a Google Fi number.

restamp

#5
Boomshnka, this thread is old, and I am no longer in possession of the OBi200 I set this up on.  However, I just spoke with the original party and I *believe* this is how I did it:  My friend had claimed a GV number to experiment with before porting her home and cell numbers to GV and FI respectively.  She created separate accounts for these ports.  This left her with two GV numbers (the original, plus her ported number) plus the FI number.  Let's say the original GV number is on SP1 and the ported home phone number is on SP2.  When a call comes in on SP2, I had it set up to ring the phone attached to the OBi box and simultaneously forward the call to her FI number using the SP1 trunk.  It worked, but the latency on a FI connection was quite noticeable due to the delays in the call transiting the internet twice.  The FI phone also always showed her GV number as the callerid instead of the real id of the calling party.

I believe your problem is that, although the OBi does support 3-way calling, it allows only one call to be set up on a given SPx at a time.  (This may be a GV constraint, but I think it is the OBis.)  In any event, your method won't work because you cannot originate the outgoing call until the incoming call is answered.  Catch-22.  That's why I had to use the original GV number to forward the call.  (At least that's how I remember it -- I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong.)

Hope this helps.  Good luck!

drgeoff

Quote from: restamp on July 30, 2017, 08:32:53 AM
I believe your problem is that, although the OBi does support 3-way calling, it allows only one call to be set up on a given SPx at a time.  (This may be a GV constraint, but I think it is the OBis.)
OBis can support multiple calls on an SP. See the MaxSessions parameter under Calling Features on the SPx configuration page. You might need to increase that from the default 2 to 4.

azrobert

GV supports 2 simultaneous calls, so this should work with the default of MaxSessions=2.

Check your OBi call history. It will show the forked call. If it doesn't, you are doing something wrong.

To access Call History:
Log directly into the OBi using the local interface.
Key the IP address of the OBi into a Web Browser and hit Enter
The UserID and default Password are both "admin".
Click Status on the left column then click Call History.