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Why Google Voice uses local cell phone plan minutes?

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Besides Skype, Google Voice has been instrumental in making VoIP a household name. Thanks to Google’s reach and some great features (e.g., FREE USA local number (DID), unlimited free calls to USA and Canada, tight integration with Gmail), millions of users (including myself) are using Google Voice as their primary communication platform. For an otherwise great service, one of the frequent complaints against Google Voice is that Google Voice uses local plan minutes and hence users cannot dump their cellular contracts.

In this post, we try to understand why Google uses your plan minutes.

Google Voice logo

How does Google Voice work?

To understand why Google Voice uses your local minutes, it is important to understand how Google Voice handles your calls.

In case of a standard VoIP call the analog voice is converted to digital packets that travel over the Internet. Thus, a critical step is the conversion of analog signal (voice) to digital packets that is typically carried out by consumer device (e.g., computer, ATA, smart phone).

How VoIP calls work?

Google Voice handles the call slightly differently. In case of Google Voice, the conversion of analog signal (voice) to digital packets is handled by Google’s servers. When you make a call, your voice travels over the PSTN network to Google’s servers where the translation takes place and then the call travels over the Internet (I have removed the call backs and other details for brevity). The call flow looks like:

How Google Voice works?

Why Google chose this format instead of the former is a topic for another day, but given that Google Voice relies on the PSTN network to transmit voice signals to its servers for further processing.

If Google Voice decides to support SIP at some point, things will change. However, until that point Google Voice will continue to use your local cell phone plan minutes to complete your calls.


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