Deactivated Ribbit Mobile Voice Mail System Because it Prevented Incoming Calls

Ribbit Mobile is a Google Voice-like service that was acquired by British Telecom. It’s service, however, is available right here in the US of A (as they say). Unlike Google Voice, Ribbit does not offer the choice of using a unique Ribbit-provided phone number or your own cell phone number.

I was fortunate enough to get a Ribbit Mobile beta service account for testing recently and followed Ribbit’s instructions to auto-forward unanswered calls from the cell phone I use as my main voice phone to Ribbit.

The initial tests of calling my phone, letting it ring until it went to voice mail, and leaving a voice mail all worked fine. Ribbit recorded my message and sent an email notification. The problem turned up with the first actual incoming call I received after setting up the service (a call from my daughter). My cell phone rang once and then stopped. My daughter said she heard a strange sound on her end and then ended the call. Both my phone and Ribbit logged it as a “missed call”. A second test confirmed this odd behavior.

Fortunately, Ribbit provides clear instructions on how to deactivate call-forward-on-no-answer. My phone rang normally and let me pick up the call as usual after deactivating Ribbit.

My action plan is to activate Ribbit for testing once a month until it seems to work as expected and then begin longer term testing of the service. Let’s hope this happens soon.

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