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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

Is there a good alternative for Google Voice? As in, a phone number that rings multiple phones, can work with SIP phones, and that shows up with a good reputation as a standard phone number?

I haven't been in love with GVoice since I degoogled my designated "mobile phone" (I've just been limping along without being able to respond to texts on the go), but haven't taken the leap to Voip.ms or Flowroute, due to the reputation problem (eg many banks' snake oil authentications reject "voip" numbers).

My tentative plan is to move my main longstanding "main number" to one of those VOIP providers, and move snake oil auths to either the SIM card in my "mobile phone", a separate SIM on a fixed cell modem, or perhaps just a new GVoice number (which only needs to receive, so interop is easy by forwarding to email).

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You can build your own google voice with twilio.

I run my own little mini telco for myself and it’s both interesting and fun.

Admittedly, I am also forced to maintain a “2fa mule” to forward 2fa to email and twilio number but that’s all part of the fun :)

I assume Twilio has the same number metadata problems as Voip.ms and Flowroute? Or have they managed to negotiate better standing with other telcos?

Can you state what these problems are? I have voip.ms but haven't actually used it as my primary number for awhile. They have SMS (using their custom app) and VoiP using SIP. Its too bad native SIP support in android (google pixel) wasn't that great for me which is why i stopped using it

1. Numbers don't work for banks' snake oil auth, craigslist account signup, etc. Either silently fails or says the number cannot be used.

2. Calls (to an iPhone, at least) where the number isn't already in address book show up as "Spam Risk" rather than the phone number.

3. Have had some people unable to text a voip.ms number, eg from Comcast mobile.

I'm not trying to hate on them or anything. I'm a happy customer for what they are. I just think these are limitations of all consumer-facing libre-protocol VOIP services, that GVoice manages to sidestep due to Fi, but I'd love to be wrong.

FWIW I've found the Voip.ms Android SMS app a bit flaky.

All correct. A twilio number will also have imperfect reputation although I can't say where it ranks among all of those providers ...

So, again - my phone number is a twilio number and I use that for voice/sms/humans but my 2FA goes to a "2FA mule" that I keep in my office:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28251107

... and all of these phones are just MVNO sims that I purchase pseudonymously and can just be thrown away at any time.

I don't care about losing my phone or my SIM card.

I may have seen that thread, and it probably gave me the idea for my second option. Still, I've got to wonder about the relative hassle-insecurity of a cheap MVNO versus GVoice. Like sure Google has a bad rep, but at least they've got good common-case security properties. Whereas a lowest bidder MVNO is likely to have poor security to begin with, and poor customer service for cleaning up after the fact. It might still be worth it to try a GVoice number first for every service, then fall back to the mule. (although everpresent point against Google: they're better at exploiting surveillance data, in a way that an MVNO won't be)

"all of these phones" implies you have expanded to multiple mules? I presume for multiple accounts at the same service? Is there any indication that really works for eg making it so all your Google accounts don't get locked at once? Or are you doing it to undermine the use of phone numbers for cross-service surveillance association?

FWIW I haven't looked in a while, but the cheapest US consumer SIM I've found is H2O Wireless (on AT&T) at $10 per 3 months.

"Is there any indication that really works for eg making it so all your Google accounts don't get locked at once?"

I don't have any google accounts.

"Or are you doing it to undermine the use of phone numbers for cross-service surveillance association?"

I am doing it because I love tinkering with the telephone network.

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