> Dumb me that I did not think of it earlier and kept paying phone company a fortune.
Me too.
Back to your question. There is nothing you can do to turn this feature on or off when you place a call. It's supposed to be work normally with Google Voice. Try calling other numbers, to people in different phone "rate centers," because maybe it's on the receiving end.
There are two fields you are asking about, Caller ID, such as 1-2015551212, and Caller Name, CNAM, such as "JOHN DOE". Phone companies in the entire US, by design due to how things evolved, send only the Caller ID field when you place a call. They do not sent the CNAM field. This includes Google Voice and the other VoIP providers.
The CNAM field is populated by the company that receives the call and and delivers the call to a home or office. That means there are many, hundreds, of databases out there that are queried when an incoming arrives, and the result of the lookup, the CNAM, is sent with the ringing signal on the call between the first and second rings.
In my experience with GV outgoing calls, most of the time the name is not present in the databases, for various reasons, so the caller sees the CallerID and something generic for the CNAM.
Note that this is not to be confused with how GV delivers incoming calls, GV delivers Caller ID but does not deliver CNAM and therefore that field will always be blank for an incoming GV call. See the workaround on here that uses CallCentric to get CNAM.
If you want to learn more about the CNAM databases, search for "Line Information Database and CNAM"
