Getting Obihai OBi110 to work with Google Voice

So I had mentioned about the Obihai OBi110 in a previous blog post: Google Voice to Real Phone and Back! Now that Google is shutting down Gizmo5, it became that much more urgent for me to get this device to my parents, since they no longer have a land line and actually make and receive calls from their home phone. Apparently their alarm system also goes through the home phone line. Good to know.

Obihai OBi110

Anyway, when I last blogged about it, the item was out of stock at Amazon.com. About 2-3 weeks ago, Amazon changed the status from out of stock to shipping in 2-4 weeks. So I went ahead and ordered one for $85. It was much higher than the previous $50 price tag when I first read about it, but I figured due to demand, limited supply, and urgency, $85 was still worth it. A couple days later, it had dropped to $70, so I canceled my original order and repurchased them at the lower price.

Anyway, it turns out that Obihai’s Amazon reseller account got stock quicker than Amazon did. It was actually cheaper too! $50 shipped (fulfilled by Amazon / limit 4) and neither CA nor WA had sales tax!

Unfortunately at the time of posting, the OBi110 is out of stock via their reseller account. It’s still available via Amazon for $85, but I found out they also have an OBi100 which may actually be enough for most people.

obi100 obi110 comparison

From the chart, it looks like the only difference is the Obi110 has an additional line port which allows you to do some neat stuff if you have an actual land line (e.g. calling from a phone outside your home and making calls through VoIP from your home internet connection). The Obi100 at the time of posting is available for $44 (after coupon / limit 4).

Review

So now that I’ve gone over the cost and the trouble I went through to purchase it, lets talk about the device, setting it up, and the experience I’ve had so far. I had my dad disconnect everything from the Linksys PAP2 and plug it into the Obihai OBi110 and it was immediately online. My dad kept on asking me what to do with the included telephone cable and ethernet cable and it took me 5 minutes to convince him that they were not needed since I’m reusing the cables from the existing ATA device. It was nice of them to include those cables though.

Different from most network devices, you do not connect to its ip address (e.g. http://192.168.0.x), but instead you create an account at obitalk.com. After verifying your email address, you click on Add Devices from the website and it’ll give you a sequence of #s to push on your phone that is connected to the device. Your device is now registered with your OBiTalk account. Simple enough.

After adding the device, it notified me that my firmware was out of date. To update the firmware, it was just another click from the website. I did have trouble with my initial attempt to upgrade the firmware, but when I tried to upgrade it again, it worked fine. This happened twice (once for my parents’ device and one for my own).

The device works with a series of service providers or your own custom SIP provider:

  • Broadvoice
  • Callcentric
  • Google Voice
  • InPhonex
  • Sipgate
  • Vitelity
  • VoicePulse
  • voip.ms

Each device supports 2 service providers, so technically you can have 2 Google Voice accounts ring the same phone. You can designate which account is in charge of making outgoing calls.

I was initially having problems setting up my parents’ Google Voice account. It turns out that he needed a GMail account since OBiTalk goes through Google Chat. After creating a GMail account and enabling calls to be forwarded to Google Chat, I was still having some issues. It finally got fixed after I deleted Google Chat (which was showing his old email) from his Google Voice account. After relaunching GMail, Google Chat got readded to Google Voice with his new GMail address and things started to work.

Update: Using the phone was pretty much straight forward (similar to a regular land line). You get to set up your default area code via their website, so if you enter 7 digits, it’ll assume that’s the area code you’re using. Otherwise, it’s 1-area_code-phone_number as usual. Voice quality felt a bit worse than when I was using my Linksys PAP2 in conjunction with Gizmo5, but it’s still way better than what you get with cell phones. There’s also this weird set of beeps (doo doo doo) when you initially pick up your handset to make a call, but afterwards, you get the the normal dial tone.

Another thing to note is that instead of plugging a phone into the OBi110, I have it connected to the house’s internal phone wiring, so that all the phones throughout the house can make and receive calls through the device.

As with Google Voice, all incoming calls are free and all outgoing calls to USA + Canada are free. International calls are also extremely cheap (rates).

VoiceStick Replacement – IPKall with GrandCentral

So VoiceStick, one of my free VoIP service providers decided they were going to start charging money. I was on the Next2Nothing plan where all incoming calls were free, but they would charge 2¢/min for all outgoing calls. I was fine with that since I didn’t plan to make any outgoing calls.

However a month or 2 back, they secretly started charging money without notifying the users. I only found out after Ungsunghero mentioned it to me and realized I had a negative balance. Since I was on the “free” plan, there was no need to provide a credit card and I might have started out with some free credit. When I saw my balance, it was at -$1.32 or something like that.

I’ve mentioned VoiceStick previously, stating how they were better than IPKall both in quality and the fact they can provide local numbers from anywhere in the USA. IPKall restricted your number to be in the Seattle area which was either 425, 206, 360, or 253. My IPKall still works fine and I haven’t had any problems with it, but now I lost a local number for my parents in LA to call me. Worse case scenario, they can still call my cell phone.

Anyway, I was just telling Derek and Tekman a few weeks back about GrandCentral, because Tekman needed a number which wasn’t long distance for his son’s school to call him. I told him about GrandCentral and how it’s basically choose a number and get free call forwarding. GrandCentral has a whole slew of neat features. Call forwarding is just one of the many.

I believe GrandCentral (being in beta) is still an invite-only service, so if you’re interested, feel free to leave your name and email in the comment area.

This got me thinking… Can I get a local number in LA (626 area code) and have it forward to my IPKall phone number. I decided to give it a shot and it turned out quite successful. Initially, I was having some quality trouble, where I had a hard time hearing the other side and vice versa. It turned out it was because I was “uploading”, which caused more deterioration of the VoIP connection than previously with my other VoIP services. Of course the quality isn’t as good as what VoiceStick was before and probably worser now since it’s going through 2 VoIP connections (first through GrandCentral, then through IPKall/FWD), but I asked my parents to give it a try and with my “uploading” software closed, the quality was actually rather good.

Setting up GrandCentral is pretty easy. You provide some information, give it an area code/address and it’ll return you a set of phone numbers to choose from. I wanted one that was easy to remember (basically one with repetitions of digits and found a pretty good one after going through about 30).

Setting up IPKall is a bit more difficult. At this point, I’m going to assume you already have a VoIP Phone Adapter (such as the “unlocked” Linksys PAP2) or you’ll be using a PC-Phone software (somewhat like Skype) provided to you by FWD.

IPKall isn’t exactly a VoIP service. They’re sort of a door that can connect a phone number to an existing VoIP service that allows incoming connections. They recommend FWD (Free World Dialup) as the VoIP service provider. FWD doesn’t provide actual phone numbers, but they allow incoming connections and what IPKall does is to connect an incoming call into that VoIP service. I’d suggest setting up the FWD account before you setup the IPKall account.

Creating an account on FWD is pretty straight forward. What you’ll want to keep note of is what your FWD Number is and the password you set. You’ll need this information to setup your VoIP Phone Adapter. Here are the settings I have on my Linksys PAP2:

SIP Port: 5060
Proxy: fwd.pulver.com
Use Outbound Proxy: No
Register: Yes
User ID: Your FWD Number
Password: Your FWD Password
Use Auth ID: Yes
Auth ID: Your FWD Number

Anything I didn’t mention, I’m assuming it’s the default. After saving, check the registration state and see if it changes to Online. It usually takes less than 5 minutes if the information you enter is correct.

Creating an IPKall account is pretty much like GrandCentral. You give them some information, select the area code you want, then select your phone number. After your account is created, update the following settings:

SIP Phone Number: Your FWD Number
SIP Proxy: fwd.pulver.com

Although it says it may take up to 60 minutes for the changes to take effect, I’ve noticed that creating a new account can take a day before the phone number starts working.

Now go back into GrandCentral and tell it to forward all calls to the IPKall phone number you just setup and everything should work just fine!

If you need help, feel free to leave a comment.

VoiceStick – Maximum of 3 Rings

For the longest time, I always wondered why my parents never left me a message on my answering machine. See, I have this VoiceStick VoIP account. Unlimited incoming calls for free. Plus the fact it gives me a 626 area code, means my parents can call me via their regular phone without paying any long distance.

I mean, my parents have always left my voicemail when they called my cell and I’m unavailable to answer it.

So the other day, I decided to try calling the number, just to test out the answering machine to make sure it’s working properly. After 3 rings, I get disconnected and hear the following message: “Nobody’s available to take your call at the moment. Goodbye.” VoiceStick does have its own voicemail system, where it even emails you when you get a voicemail, but I didn’t really care too much about messages left on this number (since it’s only my parents who have it. *whistles*), so I disabled that. I had set my answering machine to pick up on the 4th ring, but since it never got past the 3rd, that’s why the answering machine never picked up.

Anyway, I logged into VoiceStick’s account management system to see if there’s a way to increase the number of rings or the duration of hold before redirecting to voicemail/disconnecting the caller, but was unable to find any setting like that. I decided to email them to see what I can do about it:

Hi,

I was wondering if you could tell me if there’s a way to increase the number of rings for my VoiceStick number before going to voicemail/ending the call.

It currently rings 3 times and then plays the automated message telling that no one is available to answer the phone.

I was wondering if I could increase that to 4 or 5 and if it’s possible, how to do it?

Thank you.

Here was their reply, short and to the point:

No there is no way to change that at this time.

Harper Evans
Voicestick CustomerCare

I wonder if paid accounts are actually able to tweak this setting, because 3 rings is just not long enough. I mean sometimes back at home, it takes 5 rings before anyone picks up the phone.

VoiceStick

With AOL releasing their AIM Phoneline, there’s been a lot of discussion of different VoIP services. I had given it a shot, but it didn’t have any numbers 626 numbers (Monterey Park, CA) or 425 numbers (Redmond, WA) available for me. I got a PM from another user that said he had gotten a 626 number in Alhambra, so I tried Mark Keppel’s address, but it still said no numbers were available. Probably all the 626 numbers are gone.

I was also introduced to VoiceStick.com today and I’m surprised I didn’t know about it before. This is so cool, even cooler than IPKall which I had introduced several times on this website.

VoiceStick has this Next2Nothing plan which is well, FREE. You get you own local number which others can reach you at and it’s unlimited incoming calls. However, outgoing calls cost 2.4¢/min to anywhere in the USA/Canada, but there’s always SkypeOut for that till the end of this year. Also, the quality of VoiceStick is better than IPKall as I’ve even gotten fax to come in w/o any problems. So now I have a local number for friends and family back in socal that want to reach me, but for now, it’ll only get the fax machine on my computer until I purchase a 2nd phone.

You no longer have to install the bloatware that AOL requires you to install before using the AIM Phoneline.

Another cool thing is that VoiceStick works with any compatible SIP software/hardware, so I was able to configure my Linksys PAP2 to work with it with help from this thread: Configuring Sipura SPA-2000 to use Voicestick

The attributes you have to change are:

SIP Port: 5060 (or 5061)
Proxy: i2telecom.com
Use Outbound Proxy: Yes
Outbound Proxy: 206.165.50.116
User ID: <your login>
Password: <your password>

I haven’t tried to see if there were any 425 #s but since this is nationwide, I would expect them to.

I currently have $0 balance in my VoiceStick account and don’t really plan to make outgoing calls anyway. There’s always my cellphone for that.