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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.
Comments
12
Subscribe to commentsJeremy DixonApr 14th 2008 8:19AM
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.
RichApr 28th 2008 9:03AM
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.
tamer8Apr 14th 2008 10:11AM
Does anyone have an invite to grand central beta? If so please email me at tamer8@gmail.com
tjApr 24th 2008 7:36AM
I am also looking for a grand central invite. can anyone help me tjwj912@gmail.com.
mtnplayApr 14th 2008 12:37PM
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
Victor Agreda, Jr.Apr 14th 2008 9:42PM
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.
Brad LinderApr 14th 2008 9:43PM
Yeah, I really wish there was a way to turn off the "press 1 to accept this call" 'feature.'
Victor Agreda, Jr.Apr 14th 2008 11:19PM
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.Apr 17th 2008 7:49AM
tamer8,
GC suspended referrals a couple of months ago. They say that's temporary.
JoeApr 23rd 2008 5:46PM
could i get an invite? satec@live.ca
John G BrennerMay 8th 2008 10:44PM
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.
LarryMay 13th 2008 4:39PM
You can sign up for an invitation to GrandCentral here:
http://www.grandcentral.com/home/reserve