[TriLUG] recommendations for hosted telephone service

[Aaron Joyner]

Sorry to be late to the thread...

I believe the Obi uses Jingle to interface directly with Google Voice.
 Thus, no SIP required.  Yes, Google Voice, Talk, etc don't expose a
SIP end point, but they do expose a non-SIP open protocol that you can
use to interface with the system.  It's what's supported by Obi,
Asterisk, and a few other PBXs use to be able to make and receive
Google Voice calls.

I do a similar thing with Asterisk at home:
- Asterisk registers with Jingle to receive incoming calls to mine and
my wife's Google Voice number, then it rings the relevant extensions
on the SIP house phones (Cisco 7960s, android phones registered with
Asterisk via SIP, etc).
- Asterisk register a SIP connection to Broadvoice for the "home
number" DID which drops random businesses who need a number for me
into an IVR.  This filters out robocalls.
- My diaplan provides differentiated dial-prefixes (eg. 9-1-NXX-XXXX
vs 7-1-NXX-XXXX) to allow me to choose how to source my call: from my
Google Voice, or my "home" number (Broadvoice).  This is helpful to
keep from leaking my GVoice number when I don't want to.
- I route all my out-of-state long distance calls through Google
Voice, since it's free.
- Pay Broadvoice only for their "In State calling plan" (~$9 + tax,
title, tags and fees... comes to ~$18/month).

I've been very happy with this arrangement.  It goes a long way
towards overcoming the fact that there's limited cell phone service at
my house.  As long as we only give out the Google Voice and home
numbers, even if someone calls your "cell phone" (aka Google Voice)
number, it rings at the house.  This makes the wife very happy.  At
least in the 99.5% of the time when everything is working as
described.  :)  There are a lot of moving parts, and I've been working
with Asterisk as a hobbyist (and occasionally professionally) for >9
years... and it's still not always perfect.  On the flip side, TriLUG
is a great resource for VOIP questions, so feel free to dive in and
attempt to replicate any part of the above that sounds useful.  I'm
sure many of us will be glad to lend a hand, as time permits.

Aaron S. Joyner


On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 8:16 PM, Franklin Moody <fmoody at moodman.org> wrote:
> On 7/24/2012 5:00 PM, Bill Farrow wrote:
>> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 4:05 PM, Franklin Moody <fmoody at moodman.org> wrote:
>>>         Just to chime in on the hardware, I picked up a Obihai Obi110 recently
>>> and it seems to be doing fairly well from both a hardware and a software
>>> point of view.  I'm just using Google Voice at the moment as it was
>>
>> Sounds like a great product.
>>
>> Any idea how they do the Google Voice integration ?  Does it send your
>> SIP call to their server and forward it to GV using your username and
>> password ?  I wonder if you operate the Obi if you block the ip
>> address of their server, or are you dependent on them ?
>>
>> Bill
>>
>
>         Sounds like the list of stuff I'd intended to get around to but haven't
> yet...  *grin*
>
>         I assumed that it was similar to the way GrooVeIP does it but hadn't
> done much investigation beyond that.
>
> Frank
>
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