Google Announces Fiber Phone, a $10/Month Home Telephone Service 88
Google on Tuesday announced Fiber Phone, a home phone service for Fiber subscribers. For $10 a month, Fiber Phone offers unlimited local and nationwide calling, and "the same affordable rates as Google Voice for international calls." From company's blog post: You can keep your old phone number, or pick a new one. You can use call waiting, caller ID, and 911 services just as easily as you could before. Fiber Phone can also make it easier to access your voicemail -- the service will transcribe your voice messages for you and then send as a text or email. Writing for TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey explains why this matters: Fiber Phone features unlimited calls to the U.S., call filtering and blocking, voicemail transcription, and call forwarding to your mobile so you don't miss that telemarketer. It may seem an anachronism, but if Google aims to be the main or even sole conduit for communication in the areas it is expanding to, it does have to offer this.
Fire Phone? (Score:2)
For $10 a month, Fire Phone offers unlimited local and nationwide calling
Does anyone proofread these things?
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Aim low. Aim so low no one will even care if you succeed. Dinner’s in the oven. If you want some butter it’s under my face.
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Of course they proofread things; they just don't do a good job of it.
Re:Fire Phone? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well done, sir. You are setting a standard for which other editors will hate you.
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Expensive? Your old fashion land lines would be $35+ a month. Vonage is also $10/month for home service.
In order to get this service, you already need to have Google's fiber service.
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http://www.vonage.com/personal... [vonage.com]
Looks like $9.99/month with some 12 month contract or $24.99/mon no contract.
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$9.99 for 12-Months
Plus taxes & fees, with 1-year agreement.
The taxes and fees are going to be ~$12, itemized ...
Taxes
Communications Sales Tax $1.67
Federal Excise Tax* $0.91
E911 Tax* $0.75
Total Taxes $3.33
Fees and Surcharges
FCC Access Charge $6.41
Carrier Cost Recovery Fee $1.49
Federal Universal Service Fund* $1.44
Total Fees and Surcharges $9.34
Total Telephone Taxes, Fees and Surcharges $12.67
So call it a spade and say ~$22 a month. Which is still ~$10 less than I pay ISP for my phone service, but it only lasts a year, and then it is the same price as my current phone service. And certainly not as good as my current phone service, given my experience with listening to the [sometimes very] garbled reception I hear when talking on the phone to those that have it.
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Oh right, USA. I keep forgetting that you guys get fleeced for phone service.
What does it cost elsewhere?
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What does it cost elsewhere?
€1.19/month (taxes included) from a solid provider [ovhtelecom.fr]. It comes with unlimited calls within France and to 40 other countries including the USA.
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what provider?
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Expensive? Your old fashion land lines would be $35+ a month. Vonage is also $10/month for home service.
In order to get this service, you already need to have Google's fiber service.
$10 a month is indeed expensive when compared to Ooma. Ooma is free - all you have to do is pay for the device, which admittedly is $100. But it works well, and I have been using it for over a year without any complaints or issues. And international call rates are very reasonable too - about 6-8 cents a minute. And while $100 is a bit high, the device itself is quite sleek and well implemented. It has voicemail and recording facility, and is really easy to use and setup (took me all of 2 minutes to setup).
I
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I'm not sure when you're talking about, but at least into the early 2000s, my phone bill was about $15 + taxes.. Then I went metered (as I explained in another post), and it went down by a couple of bucks.
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I want to know when Google Fiber is going to roll out everywhere. I want it here, but no joy yet.
Re:Separating first and third worlds (Score:5, Funny)
At they rate they've been deploying it so far, it should be in every major U.S. market by the year 2216.
Re:Separating first and third worlds (Score:4, Funny)
Good, that means it should be available in my small town in Canada by the year 5940.
$10/month plus (Score:2)
How much in taxes? $12 more per month?
Re:$10/month plus (Score:5, Informative)
I take it you've never seen a Google Fiber bill before. This is how mine looks:
Gigabit Ethernet $70.00
Taxes, Fees, Surcharges $0.00
Total: $70.00
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Why is it irrelevant? This is a tack-on service for existing Google Fiber customers. If the $70 advertised rate for the existing service is the $70 actual rate once taxes and fees are factored in, then wouldn't we expect that to remain true for an add-on service?
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Phone lines are taxed. If you actually go to the Fibre Phone link, you will see where it says $10/month plus taxes and fees.
So when someone says a completely different bill for a completely different service has no extra taxes and fees, it's irrelevant.
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Maybe you should just lookup the standard teleco taxes. It's set by the government after all. Below are the taxes and other fees for my Project Fi service
Taxes & government surcharges
State 911 Tax: $0.19
State Consumption Tax: $1.30
Other fees
Michigan Access Restructuring Mechanism Fee: $0.19
Federal Universal Service Fund: $1.31
Federal Regulatory Assessment Fee: $0.12
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It's hard to look them up. There are usually more taxes and fees than they like to tell you about.
I think home phone service usually has more taxes and fees than a wireless service like Project Fi.
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The other fees are not fees charged to you by the government. They are fees charged to you by the telecom to offset costs of fees charged to the telecomm by various government agencies. Nothing requires the telecom to bill you for it. See http://www.michigan.gov/mpsc/0,4639,7-159-16368_40094-144717--,00.html
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Incidentally, that's how sales tax for gas, food and other goods work, too. The government isn't charging you tax, and the merchant isn't collecting tax from you on behalf of the government. That's whatcha always thought, isn't it?
No, the government is taxing THE MERCHANT, and through some long-established tradition this entitles the merchant to post a price on those goods with the amount they calculate they'll be taxed subtracted, then add it back at the register.
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Actually, it's exactly as I describe!
"Sales tax" is really an income tax the government charges merchants and service providers... because they made money, get it? The term "sales tax" is misleading. Probably deliberately. This is the root of the reason that a business which is losing money can get a partial or full refund of their taxes. They've proven that they aren't profiting.
If you're a merchant who is licensed to resell used items, and you don't have to pay an income tax on that, you can theoretically
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Wish I could mod this up!
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Phone lines are taxed.
As are Internet connections. Or at least that's what my Suddenlink bill says. Also worth noting: this is a VoIP line, not a POTS line.
If you actually go to the Fibre Phone link, you will see where it says $10/month plus taxes and fees.
And if you actually go to the pricing pages for Google Fiber Internet (e.g. Austin's pricing page [google.com]), you'll see where there's an asterisk providing additional information regarding "taxes and charges". Yet, despite that, the other responder says that he's not paying any taxes or charges. Whether that's because Google silently rolled them into his base charge or because he's lu
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Technically it is both POTS and VOIP. There are plenty of people doing POTS from ONTs, with SIP on the network side. I'm sitting in a lab full of them. To the user it's an old school 2 wire POTS line. On the network it's just SIP traffic on a separate VLAN. However, Google currently uses some kind of home grown ONT that's just a simple single Ethernet port encapsulated onto the GPON WAN. More complex ONTs can do POTS, Ethernet, T1s and RF video from a single device.
From the Google FAQ
Can I use my existing home phone hardware with Fiber Phone?
Yes. Fiber Phone includes a conventional phone jack that’s compatible with nearly all home phones. Please note that rotary dial phones and some older push-button phones do not work with Fiber Phone.
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Yep, just like a lot of (now-obsolete) cable modems I see at the thrift stores, with built-in RJ-11/14 jacks where TWC provided them with a VOIP phone service.
Google Fiber will likely swap out your existing GF router with one which also has phone jacks, or bring you an ATA to plug into one of the four RJ-45 Ethernet jacks provided.
This is good for folks who work from home, such as 'virtual' call centre workers. While these employers typically forbid work over VOIP lines, they do accept VOIP service when sup
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You mean this new service, right?
It doesn't have the "it doesn't go out when the power does" of POTS lines though, right?
(BTW, no, I don't have a POTS line any more, and for a long time years ago had one at the metered rate for my old old Tivos to call in...)
But the "still works in a power outage" is one of the reasons many people keep them.
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Is "irrelevant" your trigger word or something? Why the complete assholishness? Can't find any small children to scream obscenities at?
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irrelevant
I think it's quite relevant considering it's the same company. Those below the line fees aren't required legislatively. Regarding taxes, I don't think any locality in the United States charges a 120% tax on providing phone service.
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Well they do. Google reserves the right to add taxes and fees, but simply charge the flat rate. Whatever taxes and fees a specific municipality demands, Google simply swallows the difference. I bet they're still quite profitable.
Re: Fiber or Fire? (Score:1)
It was made from fiber til it caught on fire.
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Too much fiber and your ass will be on fire.
Filter our telemarketers (Score:4, Interesting)
Sign up for nomorobo.com. It's free service that blocks telemarketers
From their website
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Re:Filter our telemarketers (Score:4, Informative)
The first thing I think when I hear "free service" is to wonder how I am really paying for this service. This company will have complete logs of all of your incoming calls, which could be worth something to somebody. They claim otherwise, though.
From their site:
Google announces another product they wont sell me (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because you don't get caller-ID names or E911 that way.
I love my Obi, but we have a low call volume, so we use VoIP.ms specifically to get caller-ID names (free if they're in your address book). There are several options for E911 that cost $1/month, with Google Voice or separately, or you can route 911 directly to the local emergency number, though they won't get your location automatically that way.
If Google Voice gets an upgrade to send Caller ID Names using Google Contacts, I'll switch.
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Our OBI100 provides numeric caller-id. Perhaps you need to log onto obitalk.com and check a box?
What we don't like about OBI actually, is the remote administration (and the google fiber router is the same way). You have to set up an account on the merchant's website to make your configurations; they get relayed to your OBI once you save them. The OBI does have it's own onboard web admin, but as long as OBI's service is working, it'll be overwritten almost right away.
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Oh, yes, we Google Voice does send numeric Caller ID, but not the much-more-useful names. All I really want is names from my contacts.
My understanding of how the system works in the USA is that your telephone company (Verizon, Google Voice, etc.) does a database lookup on the phone number and adds the name to the Caller ID information sent with the first ring. I think there are only one or two providers of that database, and their terms are that you pay per lookup and can't cache the results. (I believe
Google will be happy to sell it to you (Score:3)
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Google will be happy to sell it to you...so long as you live in an area where construction is cheap and incomes are high enough to drive high penetration, and/or where the local government is willing to give Google a better deal on pole attachment, buildout requirements, etc. than the existing cable and Telco operators got.
April Fools (Score:1)
This article is a couple days early.
Great news, for parts of 3 cities (Score:3)
If you happen to live in the right neighborhood of one of the 3 cities that has any Google fiber, then hooray!
For the rest of you, don't hold your breath.
This should be free (Score:4, Interesting)
(And by "free" I mean at no additional cost beyond the Google Fiber internet service itself.)
After all, Google already offers Google Voice / Hangouts for free. I assume that this is just Google Voice plus an ATA [wikipedia.org] -- essentially the same thing lots of people already do using an ObiTalk [obitalk.com], just entirely Google-branded.
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I use an Obi, and I would agree except for a few things. The service they're offering is roughly equivalent to using an Obi with their premium subscription service. Google Fiber Talk customers get caller ID and other features that you don't get directly with Google Voice.
Google will also allow you to port your land line over, which they won't with Google Voice (you have to first port it to a mobile, so it can be done if you're really determined). They also provide E911 service, which is not part of Googl
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To be fair, some people might not realize how easy it is; this is a chance for them to learn. Also, in some cases, Comcast will bundle phone service such that you pay less with it than without. I did that once and never hooked it up.
More expensive than Ooma (Score:2)
Re: Thank You, Google! (Score:1)
That's not their motto anymore, which was "don't be evil", by the way.
When I get off the phone (Score:5, Interesting)
will online ad tracking now show me ads relating to what I was talking about on the phone?
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will online ad tracking now show me ads relating to what I was talking about on the phone?
My first thoughts exactly...
Why? (Score:2)
I dropped my land line over ten years ago, and have never wanted it back. Occasionally I use skype, but only when someone on the other end wants to see my beaming face; the rest of the time it's my cell phone. Why would anyone pay for a land line? Is it because the voice quality is that much better? (My current phone is a Nokia, and the voice quality seems quite good, both send and receive.) Are there other reasons?
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In the case of my wife, it's inertia. "But everyone knows our number, and we've had it 42 years." Yeah, so does "Bridget from Cardholder Services" who calls once a day! GRRRRRRR.
But this week, it rained cats&dogs, and our phone was out for two days, as usual. The response from Verizon is "we'll be out in 4 days, after the lines dry up and it works again, and find there's no problem" as usual. Coincidentally, we got a bill for $89 for our bare bones service (no caller ID, forwarding, anything fan