Any Google Voice gurus out there?

[rodr]

Before moving to the Land of Oz I had Google Fi, and that continued to work well even after the move. But after a year or so Google got tired of giving me data roaming at the US rate, and I gave up on Fi and switched to a local SIM and cellular plan.

For several reasons I still needed my US number, so that was moved to Google Voice. Hangouts worked for calling and texting via the internet at my end, though a bit glitchy.

Now Google has announced termination of Hangouts support for Google Voice, effective early next year. I think what that means is GV will do nothing useful unless it's linked to a "real" US phone number and that a mere app to replace Hangouts will not do. Is that true?

I did get a phone number from Skype and linked that to GV. The voice aspect of that works but, oddly, GV will not send text messages to the Skype number. It's an option in the settings but it's greyed out. What might the rules for that be? It doesn't matter much because GV can also forward SMS to email, but I'd like to understand.

Thanks for any insight.

[rodr]

I've learned a couple of things since my previous post.

One is that Google Voice does handle SMS via the Google Voice phone app, so that app does have a useful purpose without linkage to another phone number.

Also, that there are cheaper reliable alternatives to Skype for getting a permanent US phone number. I set up an account with Callcentric, a "bring your own device" VOIP service provider, and purchased service for about $2 per month plus about 2 cents per minute of talk time. I had Google Voice point to that, and configured the service to show the GV phone number as Caller ID.

VOIP services typically communicate via a protocol called SIP which is supported by various apps for Android and iPhone. I chose Zoiper. The standard Android phone app is supposed to support SIP natively but that didn't work very well for me.

What's odd is this information was not so easy to find. It took some digging.