Sprint Drops Call Forwarding Fees With Google Voice In Mind
First, Palm essentially put third-party Google Voice dialer gDialPro on its shoulders and carried it across the finish line by ensuring that it was one of the first (and still one of just a few) applications to land on the webOS App Catalog. Now, Sprint has come along and done something rare: they’ve dropped long-established fees. With Google Voice’s new keep-your-number feature in mind, Sprint will be doing away with the call forwarding fees associated with third-party voicemail services come mid-November.
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.
In Sprint’s own words:
. Conditional call forwarding for busy calls or calls not answered using the customer’s wireless phone will be free, beginning mid-November. (Standard charges will continue to apply for immediate call forwarding.)3 This change will give Sprint customers the opportunity to access third-party voice services, including the new voicemail feature in Google VoiceTM.
Clarification: As pointed out by James B in the comments below, Sprint is the last of the major carriers to hop on board with free conditional call forwarding.
[Thanks for the heads-up, Mike!]