Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP

http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/2011/03/google-voice-now-offers-sip-addresses-for-calling-directly-over-ip.html

by danyork • 15 years ago

132 36 15 years ago

zdw• 15 years ago

Hopefully they'll fix the security issues (4 digit PIN to log in...), or at least SSL wrap it soon.

danyork2• 15 years ago

That is a great post (and may be how the info got to the people who clued me in to the existence of sip.voice.google.com).

He also has this post writing about the type of SIP integration we really need to have with Google Voice:

http://blog.duh.org/2011/03/google-to-kill-gizmo5-on-3-april...

dlsspy• 15 years ago

Can anyone recommend a SIP phone for OS X?

As a semi-aside, I'm really tired of paying for skype since the service is so awful and would happily redirect my money elsewhere.

wiredfool4• 15 years ago

Blink (http://icanblink.com) is ok as a client. I'm not 100% on the interface, but it does seem to work well without crashing. It's gpl, and it does seem to have some momentum behind it.

There's one called simply "Telephone" which is very simple, just a textbox to call. No contact list or anything. (well, it wasn't much in december, since then they've moved from code.google to github: https://github.com/eofster/Telephone)

Gizmo5 is a crashy piece of ...something. It's the only app I've ever had on osx that has crashed so hard it's needed to be reinstalled. Several times. OTOH, you can't get it anymore, and Google is shutting down the sip service behind it.

PStamatiou2• 15 years ago

any idea how to configure Blink for GV SIP? I used +1[my number]@sip.voice.google.com and GV password but keep getting auth errors.

patrickaljord• 15 years ago

http://icanblink.com/

dahjelle2• 15 years ago

You might try VoiceMac from http://mrgeckosmedia.com/applications/info/VoiceMac . I've not used their SIP support extensively, and it's primarily aimed to be a Google Voice client, but it might suit your needs.

I also don't know if the version on the page is the latest beta, or simply stable.

The developer has been quite responsive to bug reports, etc.

dahjelle2• 15 years ago

Seems that the latest beta is at http://mrgeckosmedia.com/VoiceMac.zip with "lots of fixes."

wiredfool4• 15 years ago

It appears from the article that this is one half of the connection of Google Voice to SIP voip, the inbound sip call to gv number.

The other half, delivering GV inbound calls to a SIP phone, is still missing in action. It's also now getting a lot more attention due to the impending shutdown of the Gizmo5 sip service.

As much as Google seems to want me to switch my gizmo number to GV, GV solves a fundamentally different problem than I need solved. They are working on getting one number to any end point, and I need to map one number to my desk (without using a cellphone or hard wired phone.).

I'd love to find a good provider, but they all seem to be geared either to monthly fee for all inclusive, which is way more than I need for this application or not providing both an inbound number and the sip termination. (like ipkall) I could hack a combination, but it's probably going to wind up being less robust.

gst2• 15 years ago

Amazing that they use Yate (which is unfortunately not that widely known).

Years ago I've examined different VoIP engines for a project:

While Asterisk is one of the most widely used VoIP engines the source code and the whole architecture (at least few years ago) was ugly as hell. Instead of designing the whole system for concurrency there were some pretty ugly workarounds. In addition, it was trivial to crash the system with a little bit of SIP fuzzing (and some of those crashes may have been exploitable).

Yate on the other hand - while not having as many features as Asterisk - was just beautiful. A really nice architecture and extremely good readable C++ source code. In fact, it was a real joy to study the source.

Unfortunately I didn't really had a chance to study Freeswitch, as it was pretty new at this time and therefore not an option. From what I've seen it seems better architected and more stable than Asterisk. The main difference to Yate is that Yate only has few external dependencies, while Freeswitch tries to utilize as many external libraries as possible (e.g., instead of implementing SIP itself it uses an external library).

If I'd had to choose a VoIP engine today (and if a simple SIP proxy wouldn't be sufficient), Yate would be pretty much at the top of the list.

viraptor• 15 years ago

And the team behind it is really cool - met them on the 2.0 launch party and they were extremely friendly. They're honest about the project priorities too. It's basically a "what feature do you want to sponsor" project. (and I mean it in a good way)

MatthewRayfield• 15 years ago

If you want a round about way of receiving inbound Google Voice calls through SIP (for free) you can do the following:

1. Get free SIP service from IPTel (http://www.iptel.org/service).

2. Get a free phone number in the Washington area with IPKall (http://www.ipkall.com/).

3. Add your new IPKall number to your Google Voice account.

Now when someone rings your GV number it will call your IPKall number which will in turn call your IPTel SIP account.

barake• 15 years ago

I tried to use a few numbers from IPKall but they were all already registered with Google Voice. Sipgate[1] gives you a number free and was easy to setup with some instructions[2] from XDA.

[1] http://www.sipgate.com/ [2] http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=887131

wiredfool4• 15 years ago

Sipgate has been out of numbers since the Gizmo5 shutdown notice went around. They expect to have some soon, but no real info on a timeline.

ja27• 15 years ago

I think this is very similar to how some of us were using Gizmo5 with GrandCentral before Google acquired both of them:

http://groups.google.com/group/grandcentral-help-poweruser/b...

X-Istence• 15 years ago

Yeah, I am wondering if Google is planning on getting the functionality I had with gizmo5 into Google Voice.

antihero• 15 years ago

Why oh why is it still not available in the UK :(

detst2• 15 years ago

Likely because it's significantly more expensive to call a UK mobile than a US one. I believe that they announced free calls until the end of the year. Maybe they'll roll it out in the UK at that point but expect to pay for it.

weavejester• 15 years ago

How much does it cost to call a cell phone in the US?

robk2• 15 years ago

There are a handful of internal users w/ UK numbers but cost has been the concern since it's significantly more expensive to acquire numbers in the UK vs. the US.

pilif• 15 years ago

I would gladly pay as much as they need to cover the costs plus make some extra money if they brought GV to Switzerland.

A central number and web based voicemail are features important enough for me that I would gladly pay for them.

aedocw• 15 years ago

If you want a relatively easy way to use your GV number for inbound and outbound calls with the SIP client of your choice, just connect it with Asterisk. The easiest way is to use "PBX In A Flash". I've been using it at home for a few months and it's been fantastic.

Raphael• 15 years ago

I signed up at sip2sip.info and just tried dialing my GV in SipDroid, but it got stuck on "dialing".

gst2• 15 years ago

I've recently switched from SipDroid to CSipSimple (https://market.android.com/details?id=com.csipsimple&fea...) - which in my opinion works much better. The main difference is that SipDroid implements almost everything in Java code, while CSipSimple is a wrapper around PjSip (which is a pretty mature SIP library).

So if this doesn't work in SipDroid it may be possible that it works with CSipSimple.

robk2• 15 years ago

Google had enabled for a while a XMPP in/out gateway but they seem to have disabled it. It's still working on my account though and pbxes.org has a nice support for it built in, so it seems imminent they'll re-add this feature at some point in the near future. Given the on-deck support for SIP calling in Gingerbread, I figure they must be in the final stages of testing now.

egypturnash• 15 years ago

God, these addresses. I hope that one of the features between now and the actual rollout is letting the users assign much more memorable identifiers like 'username@voice.google.com". Still, the day when Android phones have out-of-the-box solutions for IP calling is getting tantalizingly close!

sip_advocate• 15 years ago

We found today this is no longer the case --> http://www.onsip.com/blog/rob/2011/03/08/google-voice-sip-ad...

As for Yate, we believe it has the same issue we found with native Android SIP support: It doesn't distinguish between auth username and username, which creates limitations. (SIP Authentication username not configurable - RFC 3261 Section 22.1)

Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP

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