The Future of Google Voice is Here

[mac_girl]

Straight Talk give you unlimited minutes anyways, but the data from them is far from unlimited. However you could port your number to GVoice and set it on forward to the new number so that you don't have to worry about porting it to Straight Talk or letting all of your friends and family know that you have a new number. Another advantage or porting to GVoice is that if you choose to carrier hop for better deals or rates, you don't have any attachment to the carrier number, only the GVoice number.

What many GVoice users like to do is use the T-Mobile 30 prepaid plan. That comes with 100 minutes, unlimited text, unlimited data throttled after 5GB of usage. Port your old number from your carrier to GVoice, and then through the use of an app like GrooveIP or talkatone, you can make all your calls over Wifi or data once you set the forwarding service to go through Gmail.

Perfect! I'll do that T-Mobile plan then. T-Mobile works great in my city, but not so hot in other places.

I found a good app I can use with Google Voice. The quality seems better than the other ones I have tried. It's called Mo+ Phone for Google Voice and GTalk.

I tried Talkatone and Groove, and neither of them worked well. Lots of "You're breaking up" from the other end of the call.

This is awesome!!! First, dump Verizon. Second, figure out how the heck to dump Comcast. Is the throttled data on T-Mobile's unlimited data fast enough to stream video?

 

[mac_girl]

One more question. Does it matter if you have a better phone? Will VoIP work better? My phone is two years old, it runs Gingerbread. I'm not rooted because I wouldn't know how to maintain it.

 

[jhawkkw]

I tried Talkatone and Groove, and neither of them worked well. Lots of "You're breaking up" from the other end of the call.

This is awesome!!! First, dump Verizon. Second, figure out how the heck to dump Comcast. Is the throttled data on T-Mobile's unlimited data fast enough to stream video?

One more question. Does it matter if you have a better phone? Will VoIP work better? My phone is two years old, it runs Gingerbread. I'm not rooted because I wouldn't know how to maintain it.

The age of the phone varies very little. The thing that matters the most is connection speed and more importantly is ping times in regard to latency. You want to make most of your VoIP calls over WiFi or LTE if possible. HSPA will work, but there's high latency when using it which causes a slight lag in communication or possibly even echoing if the software isn't great. I've never tried making a VoIP call on EDGE before, though I can't imagine it would be very good due to have really slow speeds. If you're not in a T-Mobile LTE area, I don't know how wise it would be to dump your ISP.

T-Mobile throttled data is quite slow and would make playing videos next to impossible. If you're worried about throttling, they do have a truly unlimited everything plan for 70 dollars where they won't throttle your data. Tethering isn't unlimited on this plan though.

 

[mac_girl]

$70 for unlimited sounds good. I am in a T-Mobile LTE area, where I live. So you can't tether? Hmmm, how do they prevent you from tethering with a tethering app? Ideally I'd like to hook up a Tivo too, that's got a little USB dongle thing.

 

[jhawkkw]

$70 for unlimited sounds good. I am in a T-Mobile LTE area, where I live. So you can't tether? Hmmm, how do they prevent you from tethering with a tethering app? Ideally I'd like to hook up a Tivo too, that's got a little USB dongle thing.

You can, but tethering isn't unlimited. I think they give you 500MB of tethering with the package, and you can buy more. They prevent you by a couple of different methods, but the most prominent one is by checking user agents of clients. As for your older phone, since you are in an LTE area, you're going to need to get a newer phone that has LTE compatibility in order to use it.

 

[mac_girl]

Ya I think my Samsung Droid Charge only does 4G even though I get 4G/LTE from Verizon.
One more possibility - Stick with Comcast internet and dump the cable tv and use this modem

Amazon.com : Arris TM822G Touchstone

 

[mac_girl]

I do have LTE, I checked the specs, but Speedtest is much slower on my phone than on my computer

 

[jhawkkw]

Ya I think my Samsung Droid Charge only does 4G even though I get 4G/LTE from Verizon.
One more possibility - Stick with Comcast internet and dump the cable tv and use this modem

Amazon.com : Arris TM822G Touchstone