Serious shortcoming of google Voice

[carl]

Hereby a link to DSL report's VOIP chat
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27993515-Google-Voice-odd-behavior

[lhm.]

Stewart said,

"Google Voice does not support "early media", where a message or IVR is played before giving answer supervision.

IMO, this is a serious shortcoming of GV. Not only are many toll-free numbers inaccessible, but you will also miss important messages such as "The number you are calling has been changed. The new number is ..." In most cases, you won't even hear a busy signal and will incorrectly conclude that your party is not home."


(<**3>18(00|55|66|77|88)xxxxxxx)|

The above in ITSP A digitmap allows me to dial out through VG3 to voip.ms and log in to a subaccount that has my GV caller-id spoofed. The spoofing is important when activating/verifying credit cards etc.

However that does not help when there is a "change of # message" on a regular call. I don't think there is a solution until Google makes a change to GV.

Having used GV (GrandCentral) as my home VSP for about 6 years (prior to above change), I have had a problem with toll free #s maybe twice.    YMMV

[giqcass]

I've been using Google Voice since it was invite only. I've never had any 1-800 problems. This may be a "shortcoming" but it isn't a "serious shortcoming".  At best I'd call it a minor inconvenience.  Still this is good info that gives us insight into how the system works.  Thanks for the share!   

[AntonS]

I have had trouble with a few specific 800 numbers.
See this post on how to fixit it (using alczarnetworks):
http://www.obitalk.com/forum/index.php?topic=3732.0

[carl]

" A busy test number is 408-269-1999."
I include this last sentence from Stewart's post .

I actually had a lot of problems with 800 numbers, disconnected number, busy numbers etc. but I never connected the dots. I considered those problems a part of general GV unreliability and whenever I had a problem with  a number I simply used one of my other providers.
I do think that this is  a serious flaw- less serious only if you know that it exists and why which applies to about 0.01% of GV users.
Google should fix it because they are losing revenue on this- toll free numbers are a cash cow. Other than that they off course could not care less , but it would be nice if they let the general public know.

[giqcass]

If this is something you are really serious about you can try using the suggestion form but I don't know how much attention they pay to that.  If they get a lot of request to fix this perhaps they will.
http://support.google.com/voice/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=suggestions.cs

We used to get a lot of attention on the help forums.  The developers watched those in the past and fixed bugs people were asking about.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!forum/voice

I'm not really sure where Google Voice is going right now.  I'm bothered by the fact it's so quiet.

[carl]

Very quiet indeed. also they seem to be much less responsive than they used to be way back when they answered on the forum so fast that it was almost like a real CS. I am clueless what is going to happen.