Good News for Google Voice Users: Sprint Drops Call Forwarding Fees

If you’re a user of Google Voice and a Sprint customer the cellular company has some good news for you beginning in mid-November:  Sprint will drop the long-standing twenty cents per minute call forwarding charge that is charged to users who forward their calls to voice mail providers such as Google Voice.  As the blog reports:

“As it currently stands, call forwarding on Sprint currently costs $0.20 per minute. For example: if a user has their line set to forward to their Google Voice mailbox after a certain number of rings and the caller leaves a 5 minute message, that call would cost the user a buck. No longer, says Sprint; for any type of call forwarding required for the use of a third-party service (such as while the line is busy, or when calls go unanswered), the minutes will go uncounted.”

Google Voice is a telecommunications service by Google which provisions a U.S. phone number, chosen by the user from available numbers in selected area codes, free of charge to each user account. Inbound calls to this number are forwarded to other phone numbers of the subscriber. Outbound calls may be placed to domestic and international destinations by dialing the Google Voice number or from a web-based application. Inbound and domestic outbound calls (including calls to Canada, Alaska and Hawaii are free of charge, while international calls are billed according to a schedule posted on the Google Voice website.