First steps in VoIP

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Nat Torkington
Aug. 13, 2004 10:43 AM
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Rael and I are about to go to London, and thence to Amsterdam for Euro Foo. Rael's been looking at Skype as a cheap way to stay in touch with our families in the US, but we're both running Mac households and Skype doesn't offer a Mac port. So I've been looking at X-Lite, a "softphone", which does have a Mac port. Both X-Lite and Skype have PocketPC ports, which makes Rael happy--he loves his iPaq.

I'm still unclear on the whole VoIP world (anyone want to write us a small consumer VoIP intro? I'd buy it!) but it appears to break down something like this: hardware phones, software phones, and the SIP services that connect phones together are all different. So I could buy a Vonage hardware phone, run X-Lite as a software phone, and get service from a company I've never heard of. Which is pretty much what I did.

X-Lite helpfully gave me a list of SIP providers. Basic SIP service is generally free--the companies appear to be making their money through offering connections to the regular telephone network (POTS--Plain Old Telephone System). In other words, it's free to call another computer user or hardware VoIP phone, but costs money to call a normal phone number or to have a normal phone number forward to your VoIP phone. Fair enough, Rael and I are Mac households, we don't need no steenkin' POTS.

So I randomly selected a provider (Free World Dialup, probably because of the word "Free" in their name) and registered. They bury their signup link but once registered, they have a Quick Configuration page for X-Lite. X-Lite obviously uses a cross-platform GUI toolkit, because the interface was a little weird at first.

Then, with values plugged in, I called the echo service at 613. Victory! I rushed downstairs and configured my wife's machine too, and we were able to talk. Then I talked Rael through installing and configuring and he called me from a Portland coffeehouse's WiFi network.

"Why," I hear you ask, "don't you just use iChat if you're such Mac guys?" I have serious iChat issues with my firewall/NAT box. X-Lite and FreeWorldDialup let you configure a STUN server and an outbound proxy, which are ways of beating firewalls and NAT boxes. iChat does some kind of NAT workarounds using snatmap.mac.com, but it's just not enough for my setup.

This is a shame, because even with only two other people to talk to I've already realized that VoIP belongs in my IM. I already set presence in one app, I don't want to have to set it in two. I already have address books, phone books, and buddy lists--I don't want another bloody data silo.

When we return from Europe, we'll report on how successful our VoIP hopes were. Stay tuned!

--Nat

Nat Torkington is conference planner for the Open Source Convention, OSCON Europe, and other O'Reilly conferences. He was project manager for Perl 6, is on the board of The Perl Foundation, and is a frequent speaker on open source topics. He cowrote the bestselling Perl Cookbook.

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