Google Fiber Phone

A landline phone service seems a bit anachronistic, but there is a place for it. The future of telephony is here, but it sucks. Many here on HN probably don't even remember this, but phone calls actually used to be intelligible. Before cell phones and VOIP, before packet-switching and aggressive digital compression, calls traveled over Ma Bell's glorious circuit-switched network. You could actually understand what people on a conference call were saying, instead of every other word dropping into the digital aether.

Or the hacker&#x27;s solution to maintaining a landline: get yourself a cheap SIP-capable handset and an account with a wholesale SIP-trunking provider like Flowroute ($1.25&#x2F;mo for the number, $.0098&#x2F;min outbound to CONUS, $.012&#x2F;min inbound).<p>Proxy through OpenVBX or Asterisk (can be hosted in the cloud or in your home) if you want to get fancy with voicemail, IVR menus, forwarding, extensions for different rooms in the house, etc.<p>ISP bundled phone services are essentially just packaging this for you with 10x markup. (I worked on VoIP installs for a summer when I was 14; it&#x27;s not that hard).<p>Only downside is most of these phones anticipate PoE, so you need to buy the power supply (or a PoE injector) separately. You also have to trust yourself to set up E911 correctly, or keep your cell phone around for that.

I like this idea, but I no longer trust Google to shepherd their side projects in the long term. Google voice had amazing promise (and I still use it) but it has also been a completely stagnant, without significant updates for a few years now. It conflicts with Hangouts, Google Fi, and the Android SMS app. Contacts are a mess. Ditto Google Groups.

Sort of weird that it&#x27;s something they bothered with, considering home phones are on the out and out.<p>Edit: That said, I&#x27;m sure there are still 100m Americans with phone service, but I don&#x27;t know that the demographics of people who care to switch to google fiber and need phones are really that overlapping. Then again, Google probably researched this much more than I did. Just seems odd from my perspective.

I think there&#x27;s still a market for landlines although $10&#x2F;month sounds like a high price point for such a feature. Having a stationary phone is important when you start having kids and they are old enough to know how to use it. There&#x27;s a gap of several years from when kids are old enough to know how to call others versus old enough to warrant having their own mobile device.<p>So what happens in the scenario when the kid(s) is&#x2F;are home with one parent or the babysitter and the adult falls down the steps and is unconscious? Certainly a 4-5 year can learn to call 911 for help and with a landline, hopefully the phone is a static location and always available rather than having to search through the house to find mommy or daddy&#x27;s dead iPhone.

I feel products like this - <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vtechphones.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;product_detail&#x2F;1673" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vtechphones.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;product_detail&#x2F;1673</a> - (just an example) are a better solution to this problem. You dont need a land line subscription, just a cell phone with bluetooth. When my parents get home, their cell phones pair to the home phone, so when they receive a call, the home phone rings. They don&#x27;t have to carry around cell phones, and they can place calls through their cell phones using the handsets. Seems complicated at first, but saved headache and $$ in the end.

Apparently no one actually fucking read the page.<p>&gt; ON-THE-GO<p>&gt;Get calls on your mobile phone. Stay connected no matter where you are. Have Fiber Phone ring your landline when you&#x27;re home or your mobile when you&#x27;re onthe-go.<p>This isn&#x27;t about landlines at all.

I recall reading almost three years ago about a pair of Google engineers who won a prize in the FTC&#x27;s Robocall Challenge, but at the time weren&#x27;t pursuing it further. I wonder if that is what&#x27;s powering Fiber Phone&#x27;s spam filtering?<p>I have a free Ooma landline, which isn&#x27;t tied to a specific ISP, but if someone can truly crack the problem of call spam, I could definitely see that being a valuable service many would be willing to switch and pay for.

I wonder if this means they&#x27;ll be actually working on improving Google Voice again after all these years, since it looks very much like this product bundles it. (The &quot;ring your mobile&quot; and &quot;transcribe your voicemail&quot; features.)

Making a play for lifeline subsidies?

Anecdata: my Internet drops out for about fifteen seconds three or four times a day. That&#x27;s not a problem when I&#x27;m reading web pages or even downloading files but it would cause problems during a phone call. My ISP offered me a bundled Internet&#x2F;IP phone combination for about $7 less per month than an Internet&#x2F;existing landline one. I&#x27;m glad I decided to keep the landline.

$10 + taxes and fees seems a bit steep, considering that Ooma is &lt; $4.00 once the equipment is fully amortized.<p>The other odd thing is that &quot;We can’t bring Fiber Phone to everyone at the same time, so we’re doing it in phases.&quot;. Given how few fiber customers there are, I&#x27;m wondering why that is..

So would it be possible to purchase this and use it as a primary phone service on a data-only smartphone?

Am I the only one who thinks this is very very expensive? I use an Italian VoIP provider. The rates for international calls are very similar, but I don&#x27;t have to pay a monthly fee. So I end up charging 6 euros every 4-5 months.

John Oliver called this two weeks ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vU8dCYocuyI&amp;feature=youtu.be&amp;t=5m18s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=vU8dCYocuyI&amp;feature=youtu.be...</a>

Oh cool! Let me check my address to see if it&#x27;s available in my area...<p>Nope. Never? ok then. thanks.

I get that Google is doing this (Fiber) in order to improve internet service, which is in it&#x27;s best interest. But I can&#x27;t help but feeling like there is some other goal here.

Why do this when they have google hangout?<p>I can see that hangout is tied to a person but home phone is not. But making it a different product&#x2F;service and charging $10&#x2F;month is absurd.

Wait....I thought adding a landline to your internet service magically made everything cheaper. What is Google doing wrong?

I wish google fiber would completely take over (especially in San Francisco) where we don&#x27;t have fios.

Just get a device from Obihai and connect your Google Voice account to it. No monthly charge

Anyone know if it can pull Caller ID from Google Contacts? That&#x27;d be a killer feature.

Is there any hope they could do better than PSTN audio quality here?

So now Google Fiber will be under CALEA?