Disruptive Telephony

Summary: Links to Posts on Calling Google Voice using SIP

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:

• So, Google Voice: SIP is actually coming? (...in some form)

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:

• Google to kill Gizmo5 on April 3, slamming the door on SIP interoperability?

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.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Join Today's VUC Call at Noon US Eastern To Talk About Google Voice and SIP

Want to join a discussion about the whole issue with Google Voice and SIP? And what we might want to really have in terms of SIP interconnect with Google Voice? And, while we're there, want to talk about the latest changes in the mobile carrier space?

If so, join the VUC conf call happening in 90 minutes at 12 noon US Eastern. Randy, the host of VUC, asked me if I would come on as the guest and I did agree. Of course, that was before I was hit with a brutal cold this week... but I'm getting better to the point where I should be able to talk fine (if a bit funny-sounding) on the call.

You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Google Voice Via SIP - Not Dead Yet... (The Saga Continues)

So maybe calling into Google Voice via SIP isn't as dead as I thought it was... multiple people have now left comments to my original posts indicating that they could call into their Google Voice number via SIP. And sure enough... I can do so now, too.

Yet to be seen, of course, is how long this actually continues to work this time. Will it be an actual ongoing service? Or is this just another burst of connectivity that will fade again?

We'll see, eh?

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Google Voice Via SIP - It's Dead, Jim

So there it is... connecting to a Google Voice number via a SIP address no longer works for me, too. After I wrote on Monday about how you could connect to Google Voice numbers via a SIP URI, many folks said that the service wasn't working for them... or did work and then stopped. So many folks were reporting issues on Twitter or blogs that I asked yesterday if Google was hanging up on SIP connections to GV numbers.

Through it all, though, my ability to call Google Voice numbers via SIP kept working perfectly fine, while it stopped working (or never worked) for pretty much everyone else who had tried it. (except for one other person who saved my sanity!) Several people on Twitter thought I must have some kind of "magic"... but all I knew was that it kept on working.

Until this morning.

It's dead now.

Using SJphone to call the exact same number that has worked fine for the past two days now only gets me a constant ringing.

So whatever "magic" I may have had is gone... gone, gone, gone...

Let's hope that Google will in fact bring back this capability... and maybe even go on to provide the other side of SIP interoperability that Todd Vierling wrote about (and others have agitated around for some time). The key point being to let us point our Google Voice numbers to SIP endpoints in addition to regular PSTN phone numbers.

It was great, Google, to get a taste of SIP interconnection to Google Voice... if only for a few days. Can you please bring it back? And even make it better?

We're out here waiting...

P.S. For those not understanding the "It's Dead, Jim" reference in the title, it goes back to the original Star Trek.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?

Has Google killed the ability to call a Google Voice number via SIP that we just learned about in the past few days? My post yesterday seems to have resonated with many folks who rushed to try it... only to find that it didn't work!

Or perhaps did work for a bit and then stopped working. Even Todd Vierling, the person who first wrote about this back on Saturday, now updated his post with this text:

[Update March 8: It seems this service is no longer working, starting yesterday evening. sigh. I was hoping to see the security bugs patched up, not for the service to be pulled down again like it was in early 2009. Please, Google Voice people, throw us a bone here and let us know what's really going on for once!]

The folks over at OnSIP published a blog post saying that sip.voice.google.com was now silent and also engaged with a whole number of us on Twitter on the topic. Ward Mundy over at NerdVittles initially came out with a post detailing how to make this work with FreePBX and then updated that post to indicate that it is no longer working.

Comments to my original post indicated some folks were having problems... and I've seen more similar comments in Twitter.

Here's the thing...

IT IS STILL WORKING PERFECTLY FINE FOR ME! :-)

Using the bare bones SJphone softphone on my iMac, I can still call into my own GV number over SIP without any problem. I can also call other people's GV numbers over SIP, too. I spoke for about 15 minutes with a friend of mine calling from my SJphone over to his GV number and reaching him on his mobile.

So it continues to work for me... but not for others. If you are on Twitter, could you perhaps let me know if you are able to call into a GV number via SIP? (Or leave a comment here to this blog post.) Perhaps if we can identify a few more folks who can call into GV via SIP we might be able to understand what's going on.

Of course, what would be best would be if Google would give us a clue about this service! Is this something experimental that people weren't/aren't supposed to know about? Is it something to be released that got out a bit too early? It's pretty obviously not production-ready...

Anyway, if you can call into GV via SIP, please do let those of us digging into it know. Would love to know the softphone you are using and perhaps the ISP you are connected to. Thanks!

P.S. My internet connection comes from Time Warner cable.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Google Voice Now Offers SIP Addresses For Calling Directly Over IP

Wouldn't it be great if you could call a Google Voice number directly via SIP? So that you could bypass the PSTN when calling a GV number and go directly over IP? With potentially all the advanced capabilities that could give? (wideband audio, video, etc.) It turns out that you now can!

NOTE: Please see the end of this article for a number of updates, including the fact that these SIP addresses may not be working for all Google Voice users.

UPDATE: 3/8/11 - Please also see my subsequent post: Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?

By way of a tweet from Aswath Rao (crediting @truvoip) today I learned that you could simply take your Google Voice number and append "@sip.voice.google.com" to get a perfectly working SIP URI that you could use with any SIP phone. I naturally tried it out with my own GV number using the SJphone SIP phone:

The call worked great. I answered it on one of my other phones and the conversation was fine - both audio streams intact, etc.

YATE?

What's interesting to me here is that SJphone reports that the remote client is YATE, a.k.a. Yet Another Telephony Engine. Yate has been around for a while (the voip-info wiki has some history) but hasn't been as widely known as, say, Asterisk or FreeSwitch. I subsequently made several calls using the Blink softphone on my Mac and again could see in the SIP traces that YATE was receiving the call on the Google end.

Looking over at the Yate News page, I see this note with regard to the January 31, 2011, release 3.1 of Yate:

Yate client calls can use Google Voice service.

The Yate client is a soft client for both voice and IM and in looking at their tutorial on using the client with Google Voice it would appear that this is about using XMPP (Jabber) to connect from the client over to Google Voice (I'm guessing it is using Jingle, which has been supported for some time by Google Talk (which is different from Google Voice)).

So the Yate client support is really something different... but the key point here is that Google appears to have chosen Yate to use on the receiving end of SIP calls into a Google Voice number.

WHY A SIP ADDRESS MATTERS

For some of us who have had Google Voice numbers for quite some time (mine dates back to the pre-Google-acquisition GrandCentral days), it's always been a bit frustrating that the only way to call a GV number was through the good old PSTN. Particularly because the PSTN is so... well... limiting. When I've been building apps in Tropo or Voxeo's Evolution platform, I've wanted to route them to my GV number... and I have to do this via the PSTN side. No big deal on one level, but it's just inefficient. If the call is already all on the IP side, why not just keep it all IP!

As we're off building the future of communications over IP, I've wanted to include Google Voice into that mix.

Now we can!

At least... unofficially. Perhaps at some point Google will come out and formally promote this capability.

Once a GV account has a SIP address, we then have to wonder what else we will be able to do with it. Could I, for instance, use wideband audio to my GV number?

For that to work, of course, I'd need to be able to register a SIP device with my GV number, which I can't do... and is the other side of the frustration with Google Voice. (Or at least be able to give GV a SIP URI as one of the addresses to call when a call comes in.) But conceivably once that happens I would be able to receive wideband audio calls. Ditto making video calls...

The first step is getting a SIP address that is workable... we now seem to have that.

Kudos to Google to making this inbound SIP connectivity available... and I look forward to seeing what else they will do with regard to SIP.

---

UPDATE #1: No sooner had I published this post when I learned of Todd Vierling's post over the weekend, "So, Google Voice: SIP is actually coming? (...in some form)", which may in fact be where Aswath and Alok learned of this news.

Todd also points out a serious security issue (the guessability of 4-digit PINs) and points out another post of his raising excellent SIP interoperability questions.

Thanks, Todd, for finding that this functionality works and for writing about it!

---

UPDATE #2: Alok Saboo (@truvoip) also posted about Google Voice SIP addresses yesterday, providing a tutorial for how to call those SIP addresses for free using the Blink softphone.

---

UPDATE #3 - 3/8/2011: I've now seen multiple reports (like this one and several in the comments to this post) that these SIP addresses may not be working for all addresses. As of this morning at 8:30am US Eastern time, I am having no problem calling my own Google Voice number via SIP using SJphone as shown in this article. However, others seem to be having problems.

---

UPDATE #4 - 3/8/2011: Given that reports continue that people are unable to access Google Voice via SIP, I wrote a follow-on post linking to some of the reports: Did Google Hang Up On Calling Google Voice Via SIP?

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

I'll be in Miami next week speaking at ITEXPO, Cloud Communications Summit, etc.

If any of you will be in South Beach, Miami, next week I'll be there speaking as part of the Cloud Communications Summit and SIP Trunking Workshops. I've got a page up on Voxeo's site that shows my schedule at:

http://blogs.voxeo.com/events/itexpo-east-2011/

I know a good number of other folks from the VoIP/UC/Cloud Telecom/Voice Mashups/SIP/etc. world are all going to be down there, so I'm looking forward to catching up with some folks there.

If you are down in Miami for ITEXPO, the Cloud Communications Summit, Digium/Asterisk World or any of the other events, please do stop by and say hello... or find me down at one of the sessions I'm in (my schedule is online). You can always email me or ping me on Twitter.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Want to Learn About SIP? Attend the SIP Tutorial at ITEXPO (50% Discount Code)

Do you want to learn more about the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and how it enables Voice over IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications? Want to learn how it works? What it does? How it can be used? How secure it is? How does SIP relate to HTML5 and what is going on with the "real-time web"?

If so, consider attending the SIP Tutorial at ITEXPO next week in South Beach, Miami, Florida, on Friday, February 4, 2011.

Taught by Dr. Alan Johnston and Dr. Henry Sinnreich, two veterans of SIP and IETF work, the day-long session covers a wide range of topics. In speaking to Alan Johnston, he said that for the first time this session next week will particularly get into some of the real-time communication coming into HTML5 and related technologies.

If you would like to attend the session you can still register. Alan passed along that the priority code "SIP" will get you a 50% discount.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Android 2.3 Includes SIP Stack, Near Field Communications, More

Very cool to see that the Android 2.3 release includes a SIP stack:

The platform now includes a SIP protocol stack and framework API that lets developers build internet telephony applications. Using the API, applications can offer voice calling features without having to manage sessions, transport-level communication, or audio — these are handled transparently by the platform's SIP API and services.

The SIP API is available in the android.net.sip package. The key class is SipManager, which applications use to set up and manage SIP profiles, then initiate audio calls and receive audio calls. Once an audio call is established, applications can mute calls, turn on speaker mode, send DTMF tones, and more. Applications can also use the SipManager to create generic SIP connections.

Naturally this SIP stack is only available if the carrier and manufacturer allow it:

The platform’s underlying SIP stack and services are available on devices at the discretion of the manufacturer and associated carrier. For this reason, applications should use the isApiSupported() method to check whether SIP support is available, before exposing calling functionality to users.

Call me cynical, but I could see a number of carriers NOT allowing the SIP stack.

The Android team has also very helpfully provided a SIP demo application.

I also am intrigued by the "Near Field Communications" addition (if you don't know what NFC is, the Wikipedia entry is a good start). Looking forward to seeing what people do with that!

All in all Android 2.3 looks like a decent evolution of the platform... I'm definitely interested to see what people do with with SIP / VoIP capability. If you are an Android developer working with communications, what are you planning to do with it?

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---

Today's VUC call at noon US Eastern: FREETALK Connect - Skype-connected IP-PBX

In about 40 minutes, this week's VoiP Users Conference call will start with Jim Courtney talking about the new FREETALK Connect IP-PBX. It includes:

• Skype connectivity for all phones.
• Auto-provisioning works with almost all models of desktop and conference IP phones
• Install wizard configures all basic networking, telephony system and user functionality on the FREETALK Connect
• Remote administration capabilities that enable the system to be administered from anywhere Internet access is available.

I'm intrigued by the system because it integrates an Asterisk-based IP-PBX with Skype - and is "certified" by Skype. I'm looking forward to hearing what Jim has to say about it.

If you'd like to listen live, there are regular, SIP and Skype contact phone numbers to dial into the VUC. You can also jump on #vuc on IRC to join in the text backchannel.

If you can't join live, a recording of the call will be posted to the episode's web page sometime in the next few days.

---

If you found this post interesting or useful, please consider either:

• subscribing to my email newsletter;
• following me on Twitter; or
• subscribing to the RSS feed

---