Google voice UK has arrived – well, minus the component that makes it so attractive, which is the chance for you to have a phone number for life that can be routed to other services like your mobile or land-line. The reason I am assuming for this is because in the States they bought a major mobile company that offered this service, but in the UK as far as I know this isn’t an available option. But here it is – just look on the left hand side of your gmail account and you’ll see a ‘call phones’ line of text (having said that I just looked and it’s gone again – teething troubles)?
However when you click the ‘upgrade my account’ tab in the google voice section it does ask you to provide a US telephone number – and there are ways of getting one of these without living in the states – this company seems to be offering them for a small charge.
This is one of the last barriers to true location independence, the ability to have a phone with you that doesn’t cost the earth. Bring it on.
You can use the google voice call phone feature in the UK again. Check out this article:
http://allurewebsolutions.com/callphone/countries/get-call-phone-button-UK.html
@Dan – thanks so much for the info on that site. i went there and read about their solution. at first i was a bit skeptical, but i figured it was worth a try for the small price. anyway, now i have my call phone button! i’m so happy. oh, and i’m a student in manchester.
It’s nice calling the US for free, but it would also be great to have a US google voice number. I found a blog post on the same site that Dan posted with a description of how you can do it.
http://callphone.allurewebsolutions.com/blog/get-a-us-google-voice-number-from-any-country/
dan, you found a winner there. i tried so many different ways to get my call phone button back, but they all either didn’t work or had some issues (ie. ads at the top of every page). i live in the uk and was super disappointed when google voice was disallowed earlier this year. i’m glad to finally have the feature back.
this all sounds like very interesting spam attempt. Just use whistle phone for free with a us based number, search whistle phone for pc
@gimeti, i’m not sure what you mean by “spam attempt,” but this solution worked perfectly for me. this isn’t for people looking for an alternative to google voice…it’s for people that want to get their google voice to work outside the us.
Um so yeah the link posted by Dan. I was reading and they claim they have discovered a software program that allows them to do this. Guess what. It’s not a software program at all. It’s simply proxying which is nothing new, they just wrote a program to run to a proxy server within the US. Prob just a box sitting in a datacenter over here. You can do this for free, they just make it look fancy to fool ppl into thinking their option is the only option. People in the US use European proxies all the time to spoof their IP’s so they can’t be traced as easily, if using the Onion network not traced at all.
Fortunately Google have decided to bring back the call phone button though we dont know whether it will last or not.