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This forum post gives supposed instructions for free land line via Google Voice with inbound and outbound calling. How is this possible?

From what little I know I am under the impression that Google Voice assigns you a Google Voice number and calls made to that are redirected to some landline number or some cellphone number you already have. That is, already having a landline number or cellphone number is required and already having that will necessitate some paid phone plan.

Can someone explain how else would you get your landline associated to some phone number? I mean fundamentally there must be something out there that maintains a mapping from phone numbers to physical landlines to handle routing. How would you get a free number in that?

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I think you must have a landline to setup Google Voice (it did when I signed up a long time ago but that may have changed), but it also allows you to take and send calls via Google Chat and you are allowed to remove the phone from the list of phones in the setup page. What someone has done is write a plugin for Asterisk that pretends to be a Google Chat client and talks to the Google servers to connect to your Google Voice account.

Because Google Voice provides free US to US calls incomming and outgoing you now have a totally free phone number.

There are similar plugins for Asterisk for other psudo-VOIP providers (like Skype) that require you to use a special client to connect, it is just most other providers do not provide free outbound or inbound calls.

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  • So when a call comes to your Google Voice number how does Google Voice know which Google chat client to route the call too? Is there somewhere where you specify route the call to the Google chat client with a specified IP addr?
    – user782220
    Commented Jan 9, 2014 at 4:31
  • No, you associate your google chat account with your google voice account in the setup screen of google voice. When you log in to google chat the server sends any incoming calls in to the chat client the same way it would send a new chat message. It knows where the client is because the client logged in.
    – Scott Chamberlain
    Commented Jan 9, 2014 at 4:36

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