In my previous post, I talked about porting your landline to GoogleVoice to enable free calling across the US and cheap international rates.
So now that GoogleVoice is killing support for XMPP, I had to find another way to get free/cheap calling and extend the life of my Obi100.
Enter CallCentric. This site allows you to get a free DID (Direct Inward Dial) in an area code of your choice (or at least, my area code was one of the available options). This service can be had for $0, no strings attached. Setup with the Obi is a breeze. It's just a matter of entering SIP id and password. The only caveat here being that you'll need to pay ($1.95/month) for e911 if you tell them you want to use the service in the US. I can do without it, so I opted out.
I signed up for my free CallCentric phone number, then went to ObiTalk and signed into my account. I added a new SP (Service Provider) using my CallCentric account details. Then called the CallCentric number and confirmed that it rang through to my home phone.
Once I had that set up, I logged into my GoogleVoice account and forwarded my calls to my CallCentric number, making sure to deselect the forward calls to Google Chat.
At this point, I could receive calls to my landline and didn't have to give out a new phone number to anyone (I already moved to GoogleVoice some time ago).
Now for outbound calling. There are literally hundreds of options with respect to voip service. I decided to go with LocalPhone. They have a pay as you go service which charges $0.005 per minute for calls to the US, and very cheap international rates to the countries I care about (Italian mobile for only $0.07/minute!). They also are easily integrated to the Obi.
I signed up for a LocalPhone account, then went back my ObiTalk page to configure it.
First I deleted the GoogleVoice SP. *sniff* That was the most painful part of this process. Was sad to see it go. Then I added a new SP using my LocalPhone details. Check out the SP configuration and make sure that it's the primary line for outgoing calls.
Now your dashboard should have 2 SPs, CallCentric and LocalPhone.
Pick up the phone and call someone. LocalPhone gives you 5 free minutes of calling, so take advantage of it to test that your configuration is properly sorted out.
Everything for me looked great, so I put $5 into my LocalPhone account. Once I've used it for a while and am happy with the service, I'll set up auto-topup. They also have monthly subscription plans, but I think PAYG (Pay As You Go) will work better for me as I don't use that many minutes every month.
I hastily wrote up this post, so please feel free to comment on it if there are any inaccuracies. Also let me know if this was helpful and whether or not you decided to try it out.
