Google Voice Discovered Allowing Pure VoIP Calls

From the article "Google Voice users learned late Monday that the service now has a way of making purely Internet-based phone calls. Making a SIP call with a 'sip:' prefix, the Google Voice phone number and @sip.voice.google.com skips the conventional phone network entirely, saving users cellphone minutes. Disruptive Telephony tested it and found that a call worked 'great.'"

Comments

Not responding SIP traffic now

[Anonymous Coward]

sip.voice.google.com now silent. See --> http://www.onsip.com/blog/rob/2011/03/08/google-voice-sip-address-no-longer-available-sipvoicegooglecom-now-silent

Re:Not responding SIP traffic now

[ColdWetDog]

sip.voice.google.com now silent. See --> http://www.onsip.com/blog/rob/2011/03/08/google-voice-sip-address-no-longer-available-sipvoicegooglecom-now-silent

Great. You broke it, Slashdot. Good going.

Re:Not responding SIP traffic now

[Anonymous Coward]

So basically Google gTalk is just SIP with some features (not very surprising) and they had an open gateway. Now they closed it.

What is surprising is why people even care whether gTalk is accessible with SIP or not. SIP is freely available with tons of providers of hardware phones (eg. grandstream) as well as PBX software (eg. Asterisk) as well as termination/origination providers to/from PSTN networks (eg. les.net, callwithus.com, etc. etc. etc.)

This is only inaccessible if you are behind some retarded NAT, and even then you can use the more expensive providers that will proxy your RTP traffic for you. Free, secure voice communication has been available for years now (IPsec + SIP would be one almost 100% secure method)

Re:Not responding SIP traffic now

[mysidia]

My (faint) suspicion is some VoIP telespammers/tele fraudsters saw the Slashdot article/blog and immediately started abusing the feature...

As nice as 'free SIP access' to the POTS network through Google voice might sound, it's not sane.

Even less sane than having offering open SMTP relays, anyways; since the telephone network is so poorly equipped to deal with any type of abuse (other than it actually being a crime if the perp happens to live in a 'civilized' country, and happens to be traceable).

Re:Not responding SIP traffic now

[TheSpoom]

I'm guessing they quickly got some very loud "feedback" from the cellular providers.

Re:Not responding SIP traffic now

[Archwyrm]

IIRC, you need to verify that you have a mobile (or POTS) number to sign up for a Voice account, so anyone who can get an account already has access to the POTS network.

Also, if Gizmo5 offered the same access, why wasn't it a problem for them? Or was it?

Re:Sniffing?

[Onuma]

Unless I'm misreading the chart, it seems like gvoice has SRTP encryption.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_VoIP_software

Re:Sniffing?

[suso]

I'm too lazy to look it up. Do they encrypt the SIP data or can anyone in the middle listen in with WireShark?

You can always speak in Swahili. Oh wait, Google Translate knows Swahili. Damnit!

Coolness, but you can already do this.

[morgandelra]

If you take an android device with google voice installed. Tell it use google voice for all calls. The get an Xlink device (http://www.myxlink.com/index.aspx). Peer the XLink to your android device via bluetooth. Now you have analog dial tone coming out of the XLink and you can put it into a PBX or regular analog phones.

Re:Coolness, but you can already do this.

[LateArthurDent]

If you take an android device with google voice installed. Tell it use google voice for all calls. The get an Xlink device (http://www.myxlink.com/index.aspx). Peer the XLink to your android device via bluetooth. Now you have analog dial tone coming out of the XLink and you can put it into a PBX or regular analog phones.

Dude, the entire point is not needing to have a phone other than the google voice number.

Re:Coolness, but you can already do this.

[h4rr4r]

I am just pissed that I cannot cancel the voice on my smartphone. I would much rather just use VOIP over wifi and 3G.

Re:Coolness, but you can already do this.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't. I cancelled my voice plan with Verizon. I'm at $50 a month right now for my data-only Droid contract.

Re:Sniffing?

[devotedlhasa]

You are misreading the chart

Re:Sniffing?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could mean this: http://xkcd.com/792/

slightly offtopic but maybe of interest

[thanasakis]

Gizmo5 (acquired by Google) will be shutting down on April 3rd. So no more SIP from them. Does anyone know whether it will become possible to make calls to normal numbers by using a google account? Right now it is possible to make calls from within gmail by adding credit to one's account. What is not possible is to use SIP equipment (many good adsl routers and ATA devices have fxp ports and VoIP SIP functionality) to make these calls. So many of us that were using gizmo5 SIP are left in the cold. Any good gizmo5 alternatives anyone?

Re:slightly offtopic but maybe of interest

[mmmmbeer]

Try pbxes.com. They have an integration with gtalk so you can use gvoice as a trunk without a separate service. If you have an android phone, you can download sipdroid and it will give you the option to automatically set up a pbxes account linked to your gvoice account. You can then point other sip devices to your pbxes account as well. Works great for me.

Re:slightly offtopic but maybe of interest

[bryansj]

I use an Obi110 device to make and receive calls on my home phone using Google Voice. It was the best $50 I've spent on a VoIP solution. It will remain free until at least the end of the year while GV is still free. Before that I used a Linksys PAP2 connected to an Asterisk server to do the same thing.

Re:Intended?

[Eponymous Coward]

I remember one time I accidentally created a SIP client. I was just trying to compute some fibonacci numbers.

Gizmo5

[Anonymous Coward]

After purchasing gizmo5, they destroyed my home phone service. I was not allowed to renew my call in number forcing me to use google voice to rout my incoming calls. At the same time, they took away my year subscription to modify my outgoing caller id with the purchase caller ID option, they refunded me by giving me $4 of call out minutes (dumb asses!). Every time I call out, the call appears to be coming from a number that has now been canceled for about a year, and cannot be modified. Now, about a week ago, they informed gizmo5 users that they are recalling all call out minutes. I have not been able to contact Google/gizmo5 ever since this all started, about a year ago. This is my home phone service they keep fucking with, and they offered no support (which was originally included in my gizmo5 purchase agreement).

This is no different to me then AT&T deciding they would quit supporting my land line because there are more profitable things to do with it. I was not even given the opportunity to yell at anyone, and now I am a ticking time bomb because of it. FUCK GOOGLE!!! Sony is the new Microsoft, and Google is the new sonny. I am going to have to resort to bing? What's this world coming to?

Re:Intended?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Is this intended by google? This would be wonderful if this was a feature and not a bug..

Probably intentional. The fact that this happened after they closed Gizmo5 which allowed this feature, methinks isn't coincidental.

Re:Not news - Gmail already does this

[h4rr4r]

Newsflash, we have smartphones so we can leave the basement and travel out into the world without being computerless. Your solution would restrict us once again to the basement.

Re:"Discovered?" - how about "Announced

[amRadioHed]

Do you see something in that link about using Google Voice as a VoIP service? I don't.

Now let me forward to a SIP URI

[z_gringo]

Now if Google Voice would only let me forward my google voice number to a SIP URI, then I would be in great shape.


I have been doing this with Gizmo for some time and it worked great, now that its disapearing. I could forward GV to Gizmo and then send Gizmo to a SIP URI that terminated in my hosted Asterisk server and from there I could do basically whatever I wanted.

I would also like the ability to forward my Google Voice number to an international number, which Google Voice doesn't offer even as a paid service.

While I'm complaining, It would also be great if I could purchase GV credit and send outbound traffic from my Asterisk or Kamailio to GV via SIP.