Hi all,<div><br></div><div> I thought I'd put together a quick email to the lists to chat about my recent experiences with SIP and VOIP.</div><div><br></div><div> I really like the idea of having a SIP system (freeswitch or asterix etc.) and having a uk geographical number that resolves to it (ideally 01274, but not essential), but what I don't like is the idea of paying through the nose for said number. So I started researching VOIP providers to see if I could find one that works and gives a UK geographical number at low cost.</div>
<div><br></div><div> Imagine my surprise when I found <a href="http://sipgate.co.uk">sipgate.co.uk</a> that not only provides a working SIP system (albeit with very little documentation, as they're aimed at having a hardware phone) but provides a free geographical number also.</div>
<div><br></div><div> Now, for basic purposes I don't really want to have to set up a full switch yet, so I started looking at the softphone options. I use a ubuntu derivitive that is based on 10.4 so I'm pretty up-to-date and I use Gnome at the desktop fwiw. Here's a round-up of what I tried :</div>
<div><br></div><div>Ekiga : Obviously the first choice is Ekiga as it is prolific and available easily. Unfortunately I was getting hangs whenever I attempted to connect to a number on Ekiga. So I dropped Ekiga and tried Twinkle next. Later I realised these hangs were pulseaudio/alsa related, so this is an option, but only if run via pasuspender, which for day-to-day use is pretty poor.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Twinkle : the SIP phone that uses the telepathy stack, sort of Empathy's SIP phone. This too had hangs on connect/disconnect.</div><div><br></div><div>X-lite for Linux : Ugly as it was I instantly realised it would not be pulseaudio aware so used pasuspender and it worked right away. However I don't like closed-source binary-only software running constantly on my machines, so next up, I picked up my android phone.</div>
<div><br></div><div>SipDroid (Android) : installed SIPDroid and followed the guide at <a href="http://www.hutsby.net/2010/03/how-to-sipgate-and-sipdroid.html">http://www.hutsby.net/2010/03/how-to-sipgate-and-sipdroid.html</a> . To my joy and amazement it worked first time!</div>
<div><br></div><div>I also looked at kphone but it has even less options than Ekiga and just "didn't work" either.</div><div><br></div><div> So it appears the softphone situation on Linux is rather dire. I also tried Gizmo but although that appeared to work (I think my pulseaudio has gotten messed up and I need a reboot), you need a pre-existing gizmo account to allow the sipphone part of it to work, and registrations are closed.</div>
<div><br></div><div> There's also one thing I wanted to mention that I found rather useful for people wanting to use SIP for business - <a href="http://switchboardfree.co.uk">switchboardfree.co.uk</a> - two 0844/0843 numbers sans subscription that can be directed to a geographical number with full call waiting, analytics and other good stuff for free.</div>
<div><br></div><div> Anyway, that's enough rambling for now, just thought I'd share my experiences.</div><div><br></div><div>--</div><div>Martynfun - </div><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">