I'm preparing for December 18th.
I am aware that it does NOT mean that my access to GV will suddenly evaporate.
I am also aware that it DOES mean that I will NOT ever be able to re-enroll my OBI202 devices if I ever lose my credentials or if Google has a change of heart.
Reading some forum posts, I think the prevailing wisdom is to have another low cost provider to which I will register my OBI device, and then link GV to the phone number I get from that provider.
I've chosen Signalwire CPaaS for a few reasons (I am not an employee of Signalwire and I have no financial interest in the company). They're really inexpensive and incredibly competent and they have great APIs.
DID numbers are about 50 cents per month and their inbound rates are about .006 with outbound at .008.
They also do 911 service at 75 cents monthly, far lower than my current provider.
They support multiple device registration, so multiple OBI devices can share the same line.
Even better, if/when I do have to give up the GV free calling, their APIs support speech transcription and SMS/MMS messaging, so I'll be able to have feature parity with GV in terms of the transcription and notification.
Signalwire supports their lowest tier customers best effort using a Slack community web portal where people are very active. Today is Saturday and I've posted two questions, to which I've received two answers from company representatives and each response took less than 30 minutes.
All the information necessary to use their platform is provided in their site documentation.
They were founded by the people that developed the Freeswitch PBX open source project as a way of monetizing Freeswitch and ensuring continued development of that project.
Hoping you'll give them a look.
Thank you - Ubergoober
p.s. Signalwire will "verify" you own your GV number and after doing so will allow you to send it as your caller ID on outbound calls making things fairly seamless when people return your call.
