The Fascinating Interest in Using Google Voice With SIP Addresses

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 is it people trying to solve real interconnection issues? What are people trying to do with Google Voice and SIP?

All these questions came to my mind today when I dipped into Google Analytics and noticed that for the month to date in November 2012, my old (March 2011) post about Google Voice and SIP addresses continues to receive a large amount of traffic:

Ga googlevoiceandsip

Slightly over 3,000 pageviews in the first 13 days of November – and if I go back a bit I see over 71,000 pageviews since January 1, 2012. In fact, it’s had about 232K pageviews since I wrote it over 1.5 years ago, and has accounted for almost 25% of all traffic to this site in that time.

And this particular article was just one in a series of articles I wound up writing about Google Voice and SIP as we all collectively tried to figure out what was going on.

Digging into the traffic sources to the page, almost all of it this month comes (somewhat predictably) from search. The search terms, at least the ones we can see (since Google now shows “Not Provided” for all searches done over SSL), show a range of interest in SIP:

Ga googlevoiceandsip search

And all of this for a service from Google Voice which seemed to be a temporary service and subsequently stopped working… kinda, sorta… and then did work… and then didn’t work. (And I just checked… and it doesn’t work for me right now.)

I find all this interest fascinating. I hope it’s a good sign that people out there do want to see more usage of SIP addresses.

And I do hope that at some point Google will open up the connection again and let us connect in to Google Voice numbers using SIP URIs. It would be a great move.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to be fascinating by all the traffic still coming to those old articles…

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2 thoughts on “The Fascinating Interest in Using Google Voice With SIP Addresses”

  2. Dan York

    Ron,
    SIP still has a very vital role to play in the world of WebRTC. WebRTC solves many of the issues we’ve had in VoIP, particularly at the endpoint of a communication session. Now, people can just use browsers and have the communication occur via that interface. There will certainly be communication that is “WebRTC <-> WebRTC” between two users, but there will also be communication sessions that will be “WebRTC <-> Other”, and in those cases I suspect that SIP will play a role in most of the connections. (Although it could be XMPP/Jingle or other protocols.)
    Outside of the WebRTC world, too, SIP is growing extremely well as more and more “traditional” systems make the move over to IP-based communications.
    Dan

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