Disruptive Telephony

Want a softphone that can make calls on IPv6 using the SIP protocol? I was... and kept striking out until I discovered that Linphone: a) ran on more than just Linux (it also supports MacOS X and Windows); and b) worked beautifully with IPv6. I wrote up my findings in this post and included some screenshots:

How To Make SIP Calls Over IPv6 Using Linphone (on Mac, Windows, Linux)

It's quite simple to use (assuming you have IPv6 connectivity) and worked very well in my testing. A big benefit to me was that Linphone lets you do direct computer-to-computer SIP calls, without requiring you to register with a SIP server or other IP-PBX. This gets around the need to have an IP-PBX that is IPv6-connected, which could be a different challenge.

As I noted in the blog post, I am definitely interested in any info people have about other softphones that support IPv6. Jitsi (the renamed "SIP Communicator") indicates that it has IPv6 support, but it requires registration with a SIP server, and I don't have one of those running on IPv6. If you have info about other softphones (or other VoIP endpoints), please do leave comments either here or on the other blog post. Thanks!

P.S. And yes, I'll be talking about and demo'ing Linphone in my IPv6 and SIP webinar on Thursday, May 5th.

P.P.S. If you want to set up IPv6 on your home network, I've posted instructions with an Apple WiFi device (Time Capsule, Airport Express) and more generic instructions using Tunnelbroker.net.

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As I mentioned last week, I'm speaking in a "Developer Jam Session" on this Thursday, May 5, 2011 on the topic of:

IPv6 and How It Impacts Communication Applications

I'll briefly cover IPv6 basics, talk about how it impacts building communication applications and the SIP protocol and then have some demonstrations of SIP-over-IPv6. You can learn more about the session and register on the Jam Session web page.

It's free to attend the session - and it will be archived for later viewing if you can't get there live during the session.

It should be an educational session and I expect I'll be writing a good bit more about IPv6 in the weeks and months ahead. (You can see some of my writing over on Voxeo's blog at http://blogs.voxeo.com/speakingofstandards/tag/IPv6/ and here on this blog at http://www.disruptivetelephony.com/ipv6/)

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Are you interested in understanding how IPv6 affects SIP and other VoIP protocols? If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I'm giving on Thursday, May 5, 2011. The topic is:

IPv6 and How It Impacts Communication Applications

It's part of Voxeo's "Developer Jam Session" webinar series and is targeted at a technical audience. I'll briefly cover IPv6 basics, talk about how it impacts SIP and then have some demonstrations of SIP-over-IPv6. You can learn more about the session and register on the Jam Session web page.

As I mentioned last week, I'm down outside of Washington, DC, right now at the SIPNOC event... and IPv6 is a topic of discussion tomorrow (Tuesday). Naturally, I'll be in those sessions. (In fact, I'm now moderating that BOF...)

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Next week in the DC area (Herndon, VA) there will be a unique event taking place - SIPNOC: The SIP Network Operators Conference. This event is organized by the SIP Forum and will bring together a great collection of service providers and carriers to share and learn from each other about the realities behind providing SIP-based services today. It will be a great place for those providing real-time communications over IP networks to look at how we can continue to expand and improve the services.

There's a packed agenda at the event that includes many great sessions I'm looking forward to attending. I'll be there speaking about SIP interoperability and some of the lessons we've learned at Voxeo as we've interconnected our SIP cloud to that of so many carriers. I'll also be donning my VOIP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) hat to participate on a panel about security.

And naturally given my intense interest in IPv6 these days (and all my writing about IPv6, I'll of course be joining in to the "IPv6 Readiness" BOF planned for Tuesday, April 26.

I'm very much looking forward to this first SIPNOC event... if you are already planning to be there please do say hello, and if you are interested in attending, you can still register to attend.

We need events like these to help improve the overall IP infrastructure and help move us faster to the time when we can have even more of our connectivity all happen over IP. Great to see!

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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.

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UPDATE - Nov 13, 2012: The interest in Google Voice and SIP addresses seems to continue, as I noted in a post about the large number of visits still coming to the site for this series of articles.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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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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!

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.

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