Google Voice Discovered Allowing Pure VoIP Calls 110
From the article "Google Voice users learned late Monday that the service now has a way of making purely Internet-based phone calls. Making a SIP call with a 'sip:' prefix, the Google Voice phone number and @sip.voice.google.com skips the conventional phone network entirely, saving users cellphone minutes. Disruptive Telephony tested it and found that a call worked 'great.'"
Sniffing? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not responding SIP traffic now (Score:2, Interesting)
So basically Google gTalk is just SIP with some features (not very surprising) and they had an open gateway. Now they closed it.
What is surprising is why people even care whether gTalk is accessible with SIP or not. SIP is freely available with tons of providers of hardware phones (eg. grandstream) as well as PBX software (eg. Asterisk) as well as termination/origination providers to/from PSTN networks (eg. les.net, callwithus.com, etc. etc. etc.)
This is only inaccessible if you are behind some retarded NAT, and even then you can use the more expensive providers that will proxy your RTP traffic for you. Free, secure voice communication has been available for years now (IPsec + SIP would be one almost 100% secure method)
Coolness, but you can already do this. (Score:4, Interesting)
If you take an android device with google voice installed. Tell it use google voice for all calls. The get an Xlink device (http://www.myxlink.com/index.aspx [myxlink.com]). Peer the XLink to your android device via bluetooth. Now you have analog dial tone coming out of the XLink and you can put it into a PBX or regular analog phones.
slightly offtopic but maybe of interest (Score:4, Interesting)
Gizmo5 (acquired by Google) will be shutting down on April 3rd. So no more SIP from them. Does anyone know whether it will become possible to make calls to normal numbers by using a google account? Right now it is possible to make calls from within gmail by adding credit to one's account. What is not possible is to use SIP equipment (many good adsl routers and ATA devices have fxp ports and VoIP SIP functionality) to make these calls. So many of us that were using gizmo5 SIP are left in the cold. Any good gizmo5 alternatives anyone?
Re:Intended? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this intended by google? This would be wonderful if this was a feature and not a bug..
Probably intentional. The fact that this happened after they closed Gizmo5 which allowed this feature, methinks isn't coincidental.