Sprint Dropping Call Forwarding Fees in Support of Google Voice?

By Kevin C. Tofel | Wednesday, October 28, 2009 | 12:45 PM CT | 4 comments | Tweet This (7)

Good news for Sprint customers considering moving their native voicemail to Google Voice. MobileCrunch reports that Sprint will be dropping the $0.20 per minute forwarding charge in mid-November. There’s no official press release from Sprint as of this writing confirming this development, but I hope it’s true. I also double-checked the Sprint support site on call forwarding and see no mention of the change in fees. Here’s what Sprint has to say, per MobileCrunch:

“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.) This change will give Sprint customers the opportunity to access third-party voice services, including the new voicemail feature in Google Voice”

Again, I hope it’s true because many commenters have voiced concern over heavy costs to use Google’s new voicemail service with your existing number. I’m just wondering what incentive Sprint has to make this change.

Comments (4)

My guess is Sprint knows that as soon as Google opens up a “port in” option for customers to bring their numbers over, carriers like Sprint will most likely lose lines of service altogether. This move could keep some customers happy enough to keep their line with Sprint.

Nathan — 1:22 PM on October 28, 2009 Reply

No kidding, this just (barely) convinced me not to jump ship back to T-Mobile after all. (Happy Sprint customer, I just really wanted to use Google Voice for all my voicemails and the N900… oh, well.)

I’d say it would look really bad for Sprint alone to be charging, but I am not sure they’d care about that alone.

Ricky B. — 2:34 PM on October 28, 2009 Reply