[Bradford] VOIP Investigations

[Martyn Ranyard]

Hi all,

  I thought I'd put together a quick email to the lists to chat about my
recent experiences with SIP and VOIP.

  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.

  Imagine my surprise when I found sipgate.co.uk 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.

  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 :

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.

Twinkle : the SIP phone that uses the telepathy stack, sort of Empathy's SIP
phone.  This too had hangs on connect/disconnect.

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.

SipDroid (Android) : installed SIPDroid and followed the guide at
http://www.hutsby.net/2010/03/how-to-sipgate-and-sipdroid.html .  To my joy
and amazement it worked first time!

I also looked at kphone but it has even less options than Ekiga and just
"didn't work" either.

  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.

  There's also one thing I wanted to mention that I found rather useful for
people wanting to use SIP for business - switchboardfree.co.uk - 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.

  Anyway, that's enough rambling for now, just thought I'd share my
experiences.

--
Martynfun -
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