Google Voice delay when calling my phone

Question

I've been using Google Voice with CallCentric as our phone service for the past 2.5 years and things have worked pretty well. Some people have had trouble calling me and the call quality hasn't always been the best, but I've always accepted that as a reasonable trade-off for a phone service running at under $5.00 a month.

Over the past few months however, I've been having trouble with Google Voice ringing our numbers. When I call a number through the Google Voice web site, it now takes tens of seconds to ring my phone. It used to be almost instantaneous - in fact, I used to chuckle to myself at how quickly Google Voice could ring the number after I pushed the "Call" button. But now, with no change on my part, there's this huge delay. Possibly related to this, more incoming calls aren't ringing our home phone before going to voice mail - perhaps the delay on that end is so long that it's just not reaching the phone before the timeout happens and the caller is sent to our voice mail.

My wife, who is at home during the day and has to deal with the brunt of this not working well, is getting tired of the hassle. We'd regret having to leave the Google Voice features which we've come to appreciate (people need to only know one number, central place for voice mail, etc.).

Here's my setup (let me know if I'm missing something helpful - I'm certainly no VoIP expert):

1. I have a CallCentric DID number.
2. I have a Linksys SPA 2102 router that I configured to make and receive calls via the CallCentric service. This works very well if Google Voice is not used.
3. I have Google Voice number that is configured to forward numbers to my CallCentric number.
4. In addition to the CallCentric number I mention above, we also have an emergency cell phone that Google Voice forwards to, but it's never on. I've tested it some now to do a bit of research for this post, and it also has intermittent delays. I would guess that this probably rules out CallCentric as the bottleneck.

Is there something that has changed with Google Voice this year causing us these issues? Is there something that I might be doing wrong?

Answer 1

Callcentric acknowledges issues with Google Voices, and says the issues are not on their end.

Pasted from the link above:

Are there any known issues with Callcentric and GoogleVoice?

At this time we have identified that GoogleVoice has trouble forwarding and placing calls to random Callcentric numbers. The symptoms include:

Lost calls Dropped calls Incorrect callerID Anonymous callerID

We would like to make it clear that there is no difference in quality nor functionality between free numbers and paid numbers offered by Callcentric. Customers experiencing these GoogleVoice issues will note that they can reliably receive incoming calls directly on their Callcentric numbers when GoogleVoice is not involved.

Based on our industry experience and extensive testing/troubleshooting; we believe this issue may be due to the outgoing carrier being used by GoogleVoice potentially using poorer quality routes. We are currently working with GoogleVoice on this issue to try to attain additional information and also to see what changes can be made on their end (GoogleVoice) to resolve the problem satisfactorily.