Quote from: giqcass on February 25, 2014, 05:28:10 PM
Quote from: oecra on February 25, 2014, 10:43:58 AM
In another post, someone mentioned that classifying your forwarding # in GV settings as "mobile" will give you the option to deactivate GV voicemail all together.
You can't deactivate GV Voicemail for calls that were placed directly to your GV number. That "might" buy you a half a second because Google knows it takes a little longer to connect to a cell phone. That's why it might have helped your situation but GV Voicemail is still active!
@SteveInWA You are a GV Top contributor. Would you chime in on this one?
Warning: very long post ahead!Yes, many aspects of GV are confusing. If they weren't, I wouldn't be
wasting enjoying so much time on the GV forum.
The confusion here is over the concept of forwarding one's GV number to a forwarding (target) phone, vs. forwarding the target phone's unanswered/busy calls
back to GV, using the target phone's carrier's Conditional Call Forwarding feature. (See, even that sentence is mind-blowingly confusing!)
When you click the "Enable voicemail" link on the Phones tab, next to your forwarding target phone, you are actually doing absolutely nothing in the GV system. All it does is display the instructions for
you to enter the command string on your target phone, to enable CCF of calls from your phone's network back to your GV number. CCF is a feature that lives on the forwarding phone's telco network, not GV. You can click that "Enable" or "Disable" link all day, and all it does is toggle the instructions.
There is no setting on Google Voice to disable
Google Voice's voicemail. The whole point of being a Google Voice user is to make use of its features, above all, its voicemail. Many OBi customers missed this distinction, being lulled into a state of bliss by the hype about "free phone service". GV is a call forwarding and message management system, not just a barebones free phone service.
When you add a phone number to your GV list of forwarding phones, GV will ring phones on the list, according to either the default settings on the Phones tab, or (overridden by) the settings on the Groups and Circles tab, or (again, overridden by) the settings for an individual contact.
If that called party's phone doesn't answer within 25 seconds (yes, it's a fixed time interval, not a number of rings), and you have
not enabled CCF, then GV will give up and take the call back to its VM. If the target phone "wins the race" and answers before 25 seconds, it takes the message.
If the called party's phone is busy, out of service, or otherwise can't answer, and you have
not enabled CCF, then your target phone's VM or answering machine takes the message.
If the any of the above conditions apply, and you
have enabled CCF, then the two systems (GV and your target phone's carrier) will cooperate to route busy or unanswered calls back to GV. This is the preferred option, but many mobile and landline phone plans don't support CCF.
A common workaround to force unanswered/busy calls back to GV VM is to enable GV's "Call screening" feature. This requires whoever or whatever answers to press "1" to accept the call. Since your target phone's answering machine or VM isn't human, and can't do that, GV will give up and take the message. There is no trick to make the opposite happen, other than to shorten that phone's ring-to-answer interval if possible.
There is an obscure setting to have GV ring all your other forwarding phones before taking a message if the target phone in question doesn't answer, to further confuse things.
Note that the 25 second interval isn't constant nor precise. The delay incurred while the call is being completed to a (typically mobile phone) carrier's network can shorten the actual ring duration at the target phone. An infamous example of this is with Sprint integration. In this scenario, if you call my integrated Sprint number, the call actually first gets detoured to GV's network, then fans out to all forwarding phones, including the Sprint phone. Then, depending on Sprint's wireless network variables, it can take so long to start ringing my mobile phone that the call gives up and goes to VM before I can answer it.
TL;DR:
No, you can't disable GV VM, and you can't change the ring period on GV.