Project Fi Will Make You Give Up Google Voice For Good

Google’s much rumored mobile network has recently unveiled officially and now the first batch of invites are being rolled out, those who are hopeful to try the service must have a Nexus 6 because the service won’t work with any other handset for now. Those who do have a Nexus 6 and extensively use Google Voice, they might want to particularly pay attention to this report, as Project Fi’s signup process can end up causing problems for you.

When a Project Fi invite is sent out to an email address, Google’s system will automatically find out whether that email address is already tied to a Google Voice number. If it is then two options will be offered, either the person port their Google Voice number to use with Fi or give it up entirely.

Currently there is no other way to tell Project Fi to leave your Google Voice number alone and issue you a new one which you can use with the MVNO.

Given that Google Voice is much more useful than Project Fi right now and some heavily rely upon it, it’s very likely that some people who receive invites will opt out of testing the MVNO just to preserve their Voice number.

If you port your Voice number to Fi it’s not like you will be able to go back to Google Voice when you want to. Once the number is ported it can’t be used with Google Voice apps, so there goes the entire voicemail and call history, because they will be wiped out once the number is ported.

So far Google hasn’t said if it plans on changing this, but we’ll let you know when the company has something to say about all this.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Cellphones
Tags: google voice, Project Fi