Receive Calls from a "Regular" Phone to Gtalk - Caller pays local rate from Ireland

Bluefrog

Here's a little idea I had after looking at the wonderful service provided by mysipswitch.com.

Setup is relatively simple. It requires no dedicated hardware and no software apart from GTalk with a mic/headset and broadband.

1. Go to www.freespeech.ie and register for a FREE (as in beer) 076 number. 076 numbers have been reserved for VOIP use and the beauty of them is they cost the same to call as a local landline number would from wherever you are in the country. What's more, those with VOIP phone services can usually call them for free; we like free no?

2. Go to www.mysipswitch.ie which is a great resource provided free by Blueface.ie and register there.

3. Log into Gtalk and invite the user service@gtalk2voip.com to your contacts.

4. When it appears in your contacts open up a chat window and type "mypage" without the quotes and click "Send". Service@gtalk2voip.com will respond with a link which you can click to get to your gtalk2voip.com setup page.

5. On the right hand side of the screen you will see a sipbroker.com code of the form *018XXXX that has been allocated to you. Make a note of this sipbroker code - we will use it shortly.

7. Go back to www.mysipswitch.com and log in with the credentials you used during registration earlier and navigate to the "Configuration" page.

8. The section we are interested in is "Registrations", click the "Add" button.

9. Enter your freespeech.ie account details in the fields provided and then in the contact field at the bottom enter your sipbroker code which you obtained in step 5 and append "@gtalk2voip.com" to it (again, without the quotes) so you have *018XXXX@gtalk2voip.com in your contact field. Click save.

10. Check the "Monitoring" screen to check that mysipswitch registered with freespeech correctly. If so, you are ready to recieve calls made to your freespeech 076 number in GTalk, if not, check your details in the registration section on the configuration screen again.

This would be a nice way of staying in touch with family here while you are abroad as it only costs the caller the price of a local call in Ireland to reach your GTalk client wherever you happen to be.

Those with compatible HSDPA phones can even use the GTalk client in Fring to receive the calls and your callers get cheap calls to your mobile.

You have to love SIP - Skype's just hype.

Happy Christmas!

Bluefrog

Had a few messages asking can this work with other IM clients such as MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and the answer is yes.

Basically you follow the same instructions as above but in the step where you add the contact service@gtalk2voip.com to your contacts you simply use your IM client of choice. You get a different sipbroker code for each client.