Three months after making my Sprint cell phone number into a Google Voice number, I’ve decided to cancel the service.
Recently, text messaging has become unreliable. In the last 4 days, only about 30% of text messages I’ve sent have gone through. And it cost a lot of miscommunication before I got to the bottom of it, because on my phone all messages indicated they were sent successfully.
When I went to troubleshoot, I checked Google Voice and realized that not only had the messages failed to reach my recipient, but they failed to make it to Google Voice in the first place.
I realize that hosting a telecommunications network with 100% uptime is a challenging problem, but frequent silent failure is an unacceptable user experience in this case.
I’m going to miss Google Voice, because I enjoy a lot of its features: text message indexing and archiving, voicemail archives, voice mail transcription, etc. They just aren’t worth all the extra unreliability and headache at this point.
I love the video! Sorry it had to come to this. I might be making a similar decision soon.