Sprint/Google Voice - A match made in hell

Last week, Google & Sprint announced the release of their much anticipated integration of services. Google Voice is a fairly cool service that's been around for a few years. It got its start from another company under the name Grand Central and was eventually snatched up by the Googlemonster for inclusion in their line up. With the service, your phone number becomes a lot more flexible. Some features I was looking forward to:

1. Multiple receiving phones can be setup to ring when someone calls your Google Voice-based number and can pick up any one to answer. This was a feature I was looking forward to using most. I could setup my desk phone to ring along side my cell when called. So, if I was sitting at my desk and someone called my cell I could pickup the headset for the desk phone and talk to them. It's even possible to setup Gtalk on your desktop as a receiving phone



2. You can specify which times you would like calls to make it through to your phone. So, you could setup a "quiet" time after 11pm where your physical phone doesn't ring and all calls are shunted through straight to voice mail. You can also specify certain numbers always get through and others never do. Useful for telemarketers or your boss having your number and trying to reach you on the weekend.



3. Voice mail is transcribed to text (albeit very poorly) and sent right to your e-mail inbox to read.



4. You can make international calls through GV very inexpensively

Some cool stuff, right? The drawback was you had to get a new phone number from Google that you'd have to give out. Now, if you were in the process of getting a new phone and for some reason needed a new number, no biggie. Just get the GV number, point it at your cell and never give out the actual cell number. This was also useful pre-number porting days as you could always have the same number. But, if you're like me and have had your number for 15 or so years, that wasn't a great option.

The Sprint/Google Voice integration allowed you to simply use the number you already have from Sprint as your Google Number. With a few clicks, everything you already have in place just gets a ton of new features and flexibility. At least, that's the theory...

The first issue I ran into was I simply couldn't do it at all. Apparently, there's a feature called "Google Voice Lite" where you simply forward your voicemail to Google Voice, but don't have any additional features beyond that. I had been using Google Voice Lite when I had my iPhone, but didn't know it was considered a different service. When I went in to activate the integration, I didn't have any of the options the announcement said I should. It showed I was using a Sprint phone, but wouldn't give me the option to integrate it.

So, I figured I'd just delete the phone and re-add it and see what happened. No go. I was told I needed to have at least one physical phone listed. Okay, I'm at my desk, I'll add my desk phone, delete the cell phone and re-add. No go. When I tried to add the desk phone, it showed up, but I couldn't do anything with it. Even the Edit and Delete buttons underneath were non-clickable text. I couldn't even get rid of any phone I added!

After a day or so, the answer finally popped up on the Google forums regarding Google Voice Lite. Apparently, I needed to click the link that said "Get a Google Voice number" (which was right next to what was listed as my Google Voice Number) and I would be asked to upgrade my account to full Google Voice and get it integrated. Google's #1 problem: they really don't seem to have a full grasp of the English language. There were NUMEROUS posts on the forums about this problem, and it was almost a week before someone bravely clicked that link and figured it out.

Great, this seemed to work. I got the options to integrate, followed the process, Google Voice called me to authenticate, I gave the code and seemed to be good to go...until I clicked the Continue button. At that point, I was told there was an error and to try again. Which gave the same error, again and again. You can't even get rid of the error message, you have to close your browser (or the tab) to get back to Google Voice.

In order to be complete and verify what my status was for this article, I decided to call my number and leave a voice mail...nope! I can't even leave myself one. Apparently, now my fiddling with Google Voice has disabled even the Google Voice Lite capabilities. Update: I decided to play around a bit further and requested a new Google Voice number. I was then able to add my cell phone back into the mix as a receiving phone which reenabled using Google Voice on it. Phew!!

This is a huge fiasco. The forums, both at Sprint and Google are rife with complaints from people having these same issues. The biggest problem being faced by folks, it appears, is they're getting some kind of discount on their Sprint plan. That would be consistent with my problem as I get a discount through my employer. What bothers me is *I* pay for my plan, not my employer, so why should it matter?

According to one Sprint employee who's trying to help out, the decision was made to block discounted employees because some employers might not want third parties having access to "their" info. Even if this is true, it's an absurdly stupid reason to unilaterally block all discounted customers. It's an indication of pure laziness on the part of Sprint.

So, if you've tried to setup integration of Google Voice and Sprint, and didn't have any luck, I recommend you stop now before you make things worse. It's one thing to experience issues as an early adopter, but complete showstoppers are the last thing I should expect. At the very least, the error messages should clearly state the reason for the failure and not some generic "oops, broke!" message.

It also points to a significant flaw to using Google as a provider for any critical services: they don't have ANY customer support at all. If it's broke, there's no one you can call to get it fixed. You can call Sprint, of course, but they're just going to blame Google (as they did the first few days of this debacle).

It's sad to see two companies who really seemed to have "gotten it" get it so completely wrong.