Free calls over wifi on the Droid

September 20, 2010 6:06 PM

Free calls over WiFi on a Droid?

I just got a Motorola Droid, but I'm waiting a while to commit to a plan. In the meantime I'm using the WiFi at home for various apps, and would like to make and receive calls using voip. I reviewed this AskMeFi question from a year ago, but most of the info is outdated.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction? I have an old Gizmo5 account, and I use Google Voice. I KNOW I can make this work...

posted by klinefelter to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Forgot to link to the previous question.
posted by klinefelter at 6:07 PM on September 20, 2010

I've done it using Google Voice, Sipgate, and Fring on my Droid Incredible. Let me look through my links and sort it out.
posted by shinynewnick at 6:21 PM on September 20, 2010

I believe the key is the Gizmo5 account. Without some kind of SIP account, you can't do the VOIP thing. Gizmo, I believe, provides the SIP arm of things for WiFi calling from a Droid. I did some research on this a few months ago, hoping to use a combination of Fring and Google Voice to make calls via WiFi while in Mexico, but since I didn't have Gizmo (or another equivalent service) so I couldn't make it work. Here's the thread I originally found that discussed some of it. It's not that useful a thread, but it provides a good start for your search terms so you can suss out more detailed info.

(FYI, you may know this, but Skype for Android doesn't support WiFi calling, though it could. But it's currently disabled because, as far as I can tell, Verizon is holding something over Skype's head.)
posted by devinemissk at 6:41 PM on September 20, 2010

I just got this mostly working, because I was curious myself. (It seems to work properly on the soft client on the computer, but over my Incredible it's garbled on 3g. Don't have a wifi network to test it on right now.)

My setup is GV->SipDroid->ipkall/iptel. Yours might be GV->SipDroid->gizmo5.

Unlike most other instructions online, I could not get a Sipgate account. When I clicked the link in the activation email, it just gave me an error. Sipsorcery is also closed to new signups. So here's what I did:
1) Registered for an iptel.org SIP authorization.
2) Plugged that info into ipkall to get a US DID number. (If the Sipgate thing worked, I could've done that instead of both steps 1 and 2. Since you have a gizmo5 account, that also should work instead, so you can skip steps 1 and 2 as well. I left that in in case other people don't have gizmo5 accounts, as it was the most time consuming part of the process for me.)
3) Installed Sipdroid on the phone and changed the account settings and call settings appropriately. Account settings is where you put in all the info about your sip account, so all your gizmo5 settings will go there.
4) Created a Google Voice account and used the ipkall (or in your case, gizmo5) number as the only forwarding number. (It won't register through ipkall/iptel on the phone - you have to install x-lite on a computer to register GV. Once GV is registered, you can get rid of x-lite, though I was using it to test the configuration and call quality, too. I'm not sure if x-lite and gizmo5 are compatible or not. Maybe you won't need it and GV won't give you problems registering your gizmo5 number.)
5) Installed Google Voice Callback on the phone. Pro-tip: The way Google Voice calls back numbers is how you get outgoing calls for free. I didn't really realize what it was until this process.

If my call quality is still crap on a Wifi network, the plan is to get this entire set-up hooked up to PBXes, as supposedly they have way more codecs than anyone else, so even if there's an issue with iptel, it might fix it. My next step will be to try other sip apps besides Sipdroid, like Fring or Guava, since the issue lies somewhere in the phone. It worked perfectly over the soft client on the computer, so I know the general number forwarding/VoIP setup is fine.

I'll update on call quality later.
posted by wending my way at 12:57 PM on September 21, 2010 [2 favorites]

My setup over wifi worked fine. There was a tiny lag and the talking-from-the-bottom-of-a-well sound, but that's it. It would be totally usable while traveling or temporarily at home.
posted by wending my way at 3:50 PM on September 21, 2010