Filed under: Internet, Google, VoIP, Beta
GrandCentral: What happens when your phone company is in beta?
But GrandCentral is still in beta. And while we've grown used to Google's beta products being more stable than many companies' final release products, we probably shouldn't be surprised when a beta product goes down. And this morning, a lot of people were probably worried about missing phone calls because of the outage.
The service was restored by noon, Pacific time. But the fact that a "power issue" at a single facility could knock out GrandCentral phone service across the country is going to make us think twice before giving out our GrandCentral phone number from now on. Hopefully one of the things Google will do before taking the beta label off of GrandCentral is build some redundancy into the system to avoid this sort of problem in the future.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Jeremy Dixon said 8:19AM on 4-14-2008
Maybe the problem isn't so much building in redundancy, but Google itself building the kind of expertise necessary to run a zero-downtime type of service.
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Rich said 9:03AM on 4-28-2008
There is an easy work-around; simply keep a vonage line or cellular # that you use as your public number, and permanently forward all calls to the grand central number; that way you get all the functionality, but if there is an outage, just unforward and either use the vonage system or drop the sim into a cell if you are using cellular. Since Grand Central has charged $0.00 to everyone so far, I really don't think anybody is in the situation to say anything except thank you for the phenomenal service that has been provided so far.
tamer8 said 10:11AM on 4-14-2008
Does anyone have an invite to grand central beta? If so please email me at tamer8@gmail.com
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tj said 7:36AM on 4-24-2008
I am also looking for a grand central invite. can anyone help me tjwj912@gmail.com.
mtnplay said 12:37PM on 4-14-2008
Sorry, I don't buy it. Not even Grandcentral or Google is stupid enough to have this hosted at a data center without redundant bandwidth or redundant power through a back-up generator with a temporary UPS. They are lying. It was something more substantial. Power outage....whatever
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Victor Agreda, Jr. said 9:42PM on 4-14-2008
Well, you can spend a lot of money getting to the five 9's of uptime, but anything more than that... Akamai does it, in a way, because of all the caches they've got. And of course, Google has put datacenters all over, which helps, but this sounds more like something else (as mtnplay points out).
Still, I hate that I put my GC phone # on my biz cards. Not only does it require extra steps for me to *answer* a call, but it puts callers through some hoops, AND when my 2nd cell is off, I wind up having to go through a bunch of voicemails that include the GC service chatting away... nothing is perfect.
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Brad Linder said 9:43PM on 4-14-2008
Yeah, I really wish there was a way to turn off the "press 1 to accept this call" 'feature.'
Victor Agreda, Jr. said 11:19PM on 4-14-2008
Well, I see *why* it is there-- so you can pick up from one phone before/after another can pick up in voicemail or something. But yeah...
What's funny is that I tested GC using my wife's phone. Instead of saying her name, I said "duuuude" when prompted to give a name. Now when she calls, I get a call from "duuuuude." I could maybe change it, but why?
John F. said 7:49AM on 4-17-2008
tamer8,
GC suspended referrals a couple of months ago. They say that's temporary.
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Joe said 5:46PM on 4-23-2008
could i get an invite? satec@live.ca
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John G Brenner said 10:44PM on 5-08-2008
When it works, it is second to none. I do use 2 numbers though, one of which is GC, to make sure my clients can contact me.
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Larry said 4:39PM on 5-13-2008
You can sign up for an invitation to GrandCentral here:
http://www.grandcentral.com/home/reserve
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