Given that I’ll be the guest on today’s VUC call in about an hour discussing this topic, here’s a list of some of the posts involved in the recent saga around Google Voice and SIP.
On Saturday, March 5, 2011, Todd Vierling pointed out that you could call Google Voice Numbers via a SIP URI:
Unaware of Todd’s post, but seeing mention of this SIP calling in tweets from Aswath Rao and Alok Saboo, I started what became a series of posts on Monday, March 7:
- Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP
- Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?
- Google Voice Via SIP – It’s Dead, Jim
- Google Voice Via SIP – Not Dead Yet… (The Saga Continues)
wherein the service was working… then it wasn’t… then it was… etc.
At this precise moment in time, the service IS working for me, although when I just tried it took quite some time for my SIP softphone to actually start getting a ring. But the connection did work.
Also of interest, Todd Vierling put up a great post earlier on March 4 about what we really want/need for two-way Google Voice-to-SIP interconnect and what we are losing with the end of Gizmo:
I love how Todd links to the many open tickets in Google support asking for SIP support.
Additionally, Alok Saboo put up two posts with tutorials about how to configure both a Blink client and a Yate client to call into Google Voice via SIP.
The saga will of course continue… there’s obviously interest… and Google’s been silent on the whole matter so at the end of the day we really don’t know what their plans may or may not be.
UPDATE – Nov 13, 2012: The interest in Google Voice and SIP addresses seems to continue, as I noted in a post about the large number of visits still coming to the site for this series of articles.
If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:
One remaining major feature of Gizmo5 that I didn’t really address in my detailed post, from March 4, was the availability of DID (direct dial) numbers outside of the US. These were available from Gizmo for a fee, but the closure of Gizmo means that users with DID numbers in countries without local number portability are out of luck. There are other DID providers, of course, but reprinting or communicating phone number changes can be painful.
Sorry I missed today’s call; I’m looking forward to the replay.
PING:
TITLE: The Fascinating Interest in Using Google Voice With SIP Addresses
BLOG NAME: Disruptive Telephony
Why are so many people interested in using Google Voice with SIP? Is this a sign that people really want to use SIP-based services for VoIP? Is this all hobbyists or people looking to play around with Google Voice? Or…