Posted on Tuesday, 2nd November 2010 by Michael

Google Voice and Whistle Phone for free calls and a local DID on any SIP device

With the latest round of rotating passwords from Magic Jack and no end in sight many are looking for other alternatives. I for one have started my own VoIP service after years of providing VoIP consulting services. I wanted something reliable. Though there are those out there that still want free solutions.

Whistle phone provides free phone service for those that are willing to listen to a 15 second commercial on every outbound call. To sign up for their service you must go to their site and download their client. Once you have downloaded and installed the client you will be able to register for their service. Make sure you register for the free service.

Once that is done you will now have all the SIP information you will need:

  • Username is your 10 digit number with no dashes
  • Password is the password you created for the account
  • The SIP proxy is proxy.whistlephone.com

At this point you will have noticed that you do not have a local DID so this is where Google Voice comes into play: http://www.google.com/voice. Go the site and sign up for an account. You will need to have a phone that they can call and give you a registration code to complete the registration process.

I suggest signing in to your whistle phone and using that number in the registration process as we will be eventually pointing your Google Voice number to your whistle phone number so you will have a free local DID.

At this point you are ready to receive calls from your local DID and be able to place calls from you Whistle phone or whatever device you want to using your SIP credentials.

If you are using Asterisk with FreePBX here are the trunk settings you will need:

UPDATE THANKS TO VANHAM: (NEW TRUNK INFO)
The following are the settings I am currently using:
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Maximum Channels: 4

Trunk Name: whistle

PEER Details:

host=proxy.whistlephone.com
useragent=Whistle/Windows 1.20 (VailSIP 20100330)
type=peer
username=YOURDID
fromuser=YOURDID
defaultuser=YOURDID
secret=YOURSECRET
insecure=port,invite
nat=yes
qualify=2000
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
dtmfmode=rfc2833
defaultexpiry=60

USER Context: YOURDID

USER Details:

host=proxy2.whistlephone.com
useragent=Whistle/Windows 1.20 (VailSIP 20100330)
type=friend&friend
username=YOURDID
fromuser=YOURDID
defaultuser=YOURDID
secret=YOURSECRET
insecure=port,invite
nat=yes
qualify=2000
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
context=from-trunk-sip-whistle

Register String:

YOURDID:YOURSECRET@proxy.whistlephone.com:5060/YOURDID

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Maximum Channels: 4

Trunk Name: whistle2

PEER Details:

host=proxy.whistlephone.com
useragent=Whistle/Windows 1.20 (VailSIP 20100330)
type=peer
username=YOURDID
fromuser=YOURDID
defaultuser=YOURDID
secret=YOURSECRET
insecure=port,invite
nat=yes
qualify=2000
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
dtmfmode=rfc2833
defaultexpiry=60

USER Context: 1YOURDID

USER Details:

host=proxy2.whistlephone.com
useragent=Whistle/Windows 1.20 (VailSIP 20100330)
type=friend&friend
username=YOURDID
fromuser=YOURDID
defaultuser=YOURDID
secret=YOURSECRET
insecure=port,invite
nat=yes
qualify=2000
disallow=all
allow=ulaw
context=from-trunk-sip-whistle

Posted in Papers | Comments (5)

5 Responses to “Google Voice and Whistle Phone for free calls and a local DID on any SIP device”

  1. Scotty Says:

    On incoming calls I’m getting, “I’m sorry but I cannot complete your call.” Any idea what’s up?

  2. Jon Says:

    If you are up for the hassle, you can setup your own asterisk server. Asterisk version 1.8 server now officially supports google talk/google voice implementation.

  3. ppuskari Says:

    Very interesting and useful information. What is not clear is how the above actually registers with all 4 of the Whistle proxies? Inbound won’t work properly unless all 4 are registered. Also at this point it looks like they do something funky on BYE which causes “Failed to authenticate on BYE” which is immediately followed by about a minute of failed registrations.

    Can you look through your logs and see if you are also seeing that behavior?

    Would love to get this working cleanly.

  4. Michael Says:

    You will need to create a trunk for each one of their IP’s to register all 4 of them. When we first did this there was only two and it worked fine.

  5. Michael Says:

    Yes

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