Disruptive Telephony

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.

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