A New Don

UPDATE JUN 2015: We’re now two years in and the Anveo solution has been working great. We added an 888 toll-free number for emergency calls to home and to give out for other purposes. SPAM callers are routinely added to our blacklist and have become much fewer as a result. Monthly cost of service is well under $5 typically at our usage, including the extra 888 number. Call quality remains great (the only quality issues we’ve had were a result of our cordless phone being in the same frequency range as our wireless router – sound on a wired phone is fantastic). I’m looking at doing some stuff with Anveo’s new web API to automate some telephony in the future.

UPDATE OCT 2014: Well, it appears Google has changed their mind and what I describe below continues to remain available via Google Voice and the Obi device. I took their word for it and moved my solution over to Anveo (including porting my number to them), which has been pretty robust and much more flexible, but does cost a bit more a month (peanuts, really). However, had I known then that GV would stay available on the Obi, I would have stayed with the solution documented below.

UPDATE OCT 2013: Google has announced that the interface that the Obi device uses to connect with Google Voice will stop working on May 15, 2014. This means that the days of free voice calls using the Obi/GV solution detailed below will be coming to a close at that time. The Obi will still provide VOIP access to other low cost services (like Anveo, as detailed below) going forward.

I’ve been using VOIP (voice over internet protocol) phone service since 2006. I was previously using a small local company, Galaxy Voice, with pretty much zero problems from the start (just an occasional need to reboot my Grandstream ATA or network gear periodically after a power outage, etc.). I was very happy with their plan I had – which cost basically $5 or less monthly (usage-based). Unfortunately, I got a notification email that they were effectively going out of business (due to the failure of their supplier) at the end of June 2013. So the hunt was on for a replacement carrier!

I knew about the possibility of using Asterisk PBX software on a local linux machine to be able to make low/no cost calls using Google Voice (hereafter referred to as “GV”), but setting up an Asterisk server with dialplans, etc. is not for the faint of heart. So I was really looking for a traditional VOIP provider that would replace Galaxy Voice at the cost level we had been used to. The basic consumer-oriented VOIP companies (e.g.: Vonage {which I’d used before for my work-from-home business line} or VoIPo, etc.) all seem to have decided that the ~$10-15 price point is their target, unless you pay for two years in advance. Paying in advance for a long term commitment to something I had no experience with was a bit of a leap and their long term pricing was still on the high side of my target (given that both my wife and I use our cell phones for much of our calling, so the home phone has been mostly just for accounts contacts, etc. and not daily use). So another solution was desired.

Google Voice

I’ve had GV in place for several applications up to now and was very pleased with the service and features. For instance, I set up the New England Folk Festival Association (NEFFA), a purely volunteer-run organization, to use a GV account as their main number which then sends to select board members an email transcription and vmail link for follow up action. Also my wife and I have GV numbers which we give out so folks have “one number” access to us on both our cell phones and home phone. Additionally, GV offers SPAM filtering for calls much like their well known email filtering! So going with GV was a great idea from my perspective. Now, just how to do it without major complications…

Obihai ObiTalk Devices

My research ultimately accidentally uncovered the Obihai tech ObiTalk devices, which promised easy GV configuration right out of the box. As I sometimes subscribe to the “pay just a little more to get disproportionately more” school of tech purchasing, I went with their model 110 device (~$50) instead of a 100 (~$40). This way, if I ever found a need to connect my new Obi110 with my old Grandstream HT-386, I’d have the analog phone port available.

Porting Fun

The biggest difficulty in the whole process was working through porting our old home phone number from the rapidly dying Galaxyvoice through to Google Voice. Because Google only supports porting in mobile numbers, I had to port the number twice: from Galaxy to a cell phone provider (I used Tracfone as I already had an old phone for them sitting around) and then from Tracfone to Google Voice. Long story short, this process cost ~$40 total and took a little over a week including the shipment of a new SIM card.

Setting Things Up with the Obi110 and GV

As the first stage of the porting process was under way, I created a new Google account to use solely for the home phone service. I did this standalone account as a security mechanism so, even if the account got hacked, there would be no additional risk of my primary account’s other personal information (email addresses, etc.) being leaked. This let me pick a new local phone number to use as a GV number in the interim. I then used that account’s details to set up and test the Obi110 device. It worked great, no issues with call quality and NO bill. The one major limitation I discovered is that GV doesn’t support 911 calls.

E911 Support and Other Feature Needs – Anveo

So to cover the 911 need (we have a small child at home and working 911 is always a great idea), I opted to sign up for inbound and outbound service through Anveo.com (see link below) and use that as the second VOIP service registered on the Obi110. This worked out for several reasons… for one, I needed to provide a number in my parents’ area code ($2 per month with unlimited incoming minutes) so they could call me from the facility they are now living in (which only allows local calls) and Google Voice did not currently have any local numbers available – so GV was not an option. Secondly, they provide E911 service for a very low monthly fee ($0.80/month) plus the outgoing call rate (low, and we hope to never have to dial 911). As a bonus, Anveo supports both FAX receipt (free) and sending (very low rate) using that same number. Third, as Google Voice does not allow for one GV number to forward to another GV number [*I later discovered a unique workaround for this, see below], we’d need a new number for my wife’s and my GV “one number” numbers to forward to. Fourthly, Anveo allows you to set the outgoing caller ID to be any number you can prove you own (by answering a call at that number), so any call we place via either GV or Anveo will always show our home phone number as the caller ID.

Setting up the Anveo service on the Obi110 was really easy through their portal and worked straight away. Anveo provides a ‘933’ number you can call to test 911 without bothering your local emergency center, which showed all was set up properly. BTW, Anveo’s payment scheme is pre-paid, much like filling a gas tank: you use some payment mechanism (PayPal is preferred) to put funds on account with them and they bill against (deduct from) that balance automatically for the service used. They’ll alert you when your account balance gets low so you can top it up. So far I am very happy with Anveo – they responded to (by implementing!) a couple of feature requests/fixes I submitted to their feedback form in under 24 hours! When did you ever see that from the likes of AT&T or Comcast?

Buttoning Up

Once the Tracfone port completed (which required much hand holding/follow-up on my part due to the Galaxyvoice situation), the GV porting was submitted and finished in just a couple of days. When done, the old home phone number now rang straight through to the phones attached to the Obi110. Success! The interim GV phone number will go away in a short while (but if I wanted to keep it as a second number they offer to do so for a one time fee of $20, before that expiration date). As with any VOIP solution, the Obi110 is subject to power outage downtime, so I added it to the set of machines powered through our UPS for battery back up. And we can always call on one of our mobiles during an extended or widespread outage.

Bottom Line

We now have a full phone solution fielding more features than we were looking for, paying just $2.80/month (even lower once I take advantage of Anveo’s 1 year prepay service discount).

Regular calls come in and go out through Google Voice. Calls from my parents (and FAXes) come in through Anveo and should we ever call 911 it will go through them (as can outbound FAXes via their web portal). We don’t have to do anything special for calls, just dial (or answer) the home phone and the Obi110 routes it all correctly. We’ve been using this solution for over a month and nobody has said a thing about the GV call quality or not being able to reach us – so all is well. The one downside is caller ID. Unfortunately GV has very limited caller ID – all calls processed via GV show only the phone number (not name) passed through (both in- and outgoing) to any phones involved (there’s a lot of folks clamoring for caller ID with name to be added, which I hope they do). Google does offer somewhat better caller ID via the voicemail and contacts system – so long as you tag a contact to a given phone number, the GV web portal shows the contact name you set (for instance, on a voicemail transcription).

The biggest chore with the transition was researching the possible solutions (which I hope you benefit from here :)). Should you value this info and sign up for Anveo service, I hope you will provide my referral code 3018755 at the time of sign up so I can get a small service credit, you enter it here in the signup form:

Google Voice to Google Voice Forwarding Discovery

As has been widely lamented on the web, GV does not allow for one GV number to forward to another. This is a significant limitation for many hoping to use GV as their primary carrier, and I anticipated running into it once we ported our home phone number over to GV. I expected that my wife and I would need to change our personal GV “one number” numbers to point to the new Anveo number we provisioned above (which is why I went for the Anveo $2/month unlimited incoming service vs. the $1/month + usage minutes service – our monthly total cost could be as low as $1+0.80/month as a result of my GV internal forwarding discovery).

Remember, we had already had our separate GV numbers set up with the home number as a forwarding phone (whilst provisioned via the old VOIP supplier). To my happy discovery, our separate GV numbers continued to ring through to our home phone number after it was ported to GV! So it appears that the GV system is perfectly capable of forwarding from one GV number to another, they just preclude it when you set up a forwarding number. The key is to already have the forwarding set up while the target number is outside the GV system and then to port the number in, which will bypass the apparent step of checking for GV internal forwarding.

Again, I hope you find this information helpful and I definitely recommend implementing this solution if it meets your needs. Please do consider using my Anveo referral code 3018755 if you follow our path and use them. Happy calling!