Sunday, August 20, 2017

On the Way to VoIP - Follow-Up

I've been living with my Google Voice/OBi100 system (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8) for a couple of years and thought it was time for a follow-up.

Obihia and Google did a little dance a while back but finally kissed and made up. My service was never disrupted.

My OBi100 has gone end of life. The support was never outstanding nor really a problem. I bought a OBi200 to replace the OBi100 but haven't even bothered to install it. The transition was seamless.

The E911 support from Anveo has been fine I guess. Thankfully I've never used it. Their billing system is kinda wonky. The E911 service is $15 per year and you have to pay for it with a prepaid account. Then when the year lapsed and there wasn't sufficient balance to renew they Anveo just canceled the service and sent me an e-mail.
Customer,
We would like to inform you there was not enough funds in your account balance to extend your E911 coverage.
As of this moment the following E911 address is no longer covered and you can not make 911 calls:
<snip>
Your current account balance: $0
You may not be able to place outgoing calls without having at least one E911 address configured.
Please add funds and re-configure E911 coverage for the above mentioned address.
I deposited $15 and put a reminder on my calendar.

After a couple of months using Google Voice I went back and reviewed all the incoming calls. I added all the known callers to the Contacts on that Google account. Then I flipped the switch to screen callers that weren't in the address book. That only works so so since the OBi100 doesn't really support Google Voice's call screening in spite of them stating that it does.

What the OBi100 does is if Google Voice causes a prompt for screening, the caller hears the prompt and then gets transferred immediately on to the handset. The good news is that this pretty much causes the telemarketers to hang up. Good enough.

Either Google or Obihia fixed this and call screening now works perfectly.

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