adium supports "SIP / SIMPLE"

SIMPLE - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Found this out tonight, when I upgraded to adium-1.5.8b1.

Added my SIP account to adium, but I don't know of anybody using "SIP / SIMPLE". Is anybody out there, who can contact me à la "SIP / SIMPLE"?

Skype for Asterisk disconnecting - The H Open Source: News and Features

Skype for Asterisk disconnecting - The H Open Source: News and Features

The good news: at Skype they emphasise on their SIP compatibility.

GNU Free Call starts development, aims to be a Skype alternative - The H Open Source: News and Features

GNU Free Call starts development, aims to be a Skype alternative - The H Open Source: News and Features

how to call a SIP phone by its IP-address

You may of course replace IP-address here by DNS name.

The Scenario:

The callee has a number of accounts configured on his SIP phone (resp. SIP capable router or whatever (a FRITZ!Box 7390 in my case)).
One of the accounts is 456123 at whatever SIP provider. (This works for all the accounts set up on your SIP phone.)
It is strange, but for this purpose here, it does not matter, which SIP provider this account is tied with.

The DNS name of your SIP phone is xyz.dyndns.org.

You can now call the SIP phone at sip:456123@xyz.dyndns.org.

Of course you yourself have to use a SIP capable phone or software in order to place a call to such an address.

For the FRITZ!Boxes you remove the leading "sip:", so you only enter 456123@xyz.dyndns.org as a phone number on your 1st phone book of your FRITZ!Box, and of course the entry needs a name. The phone book entry will also get a shortcut assigned (that you can alter, if you want to), and you have to leave a (non-ambiguous) shortcut there, even if you don't make direct use of it.
You can than call that remote SIP phone by this shortcut.
On a FRITZ!Fon MT-F you can also call that remote SIP phone "directly" from the FRITZ!Box that 1st phone book visible on the FRITZ!Fon MT-F.

I learned tonight, was, that you can (only) call the callee using the "account names" of the SIP accounts, he has with any resp. all SIP providers (apparently) outside.

I actually hope, there is a way to set up an SIP account on the callee's SIP phone, that is not tied to a SIP provider at all. I don't see the serious reason for that.
There should be a way, the callee answers on accounts, that he does not necessarily hold with SIP providers "outside". But I don't know yet, how to set up such an account on my SIP capable router.
I do actually know, how to set up such an account for the "Local Area Network" of my router, but I don't know yet, how to do this for the "Wide Are Network" side of my router.

To Be Continued …

SIP and international telephone numbers to get called at

You are living in country X, but you want to have a telephone number in country Y, where you can get called at. Some combinations of providers and governments won't allow it, but it's worth having a look at it. Some providers will charge you quite some Dollars, Euros, or whatever. Find out!
Here are some links:

• inphonex.com – that's the one, I use for my Brazilian telephone number
• sipgate.de 
• 12voip.com
• voipstunt.com
• voipraider.com
• intervoip.com

All this is possible at rather low prices nowadays through Internet telephony aka VoIP esp. SIP. Of course SIP is not the only VoIP protocol available on the Internet, there is also XMPP aka Jabber, which is more of a general purpose thing, because it also comprises instant messaging aka IM. XMPP is actively propagated amongst other esp. by Google, so I asssume quite some progress and change in this market. Yes, there are already quite some SIP telephones out there, but actually with a smartphone (Android, iPhone, iTouch) and the XMPP right app, you don't mind the assets of the early adopters, right?

What do I use it for resp. what do I like to use international telelephone numbers for? Well, e.g. calling from  Germany to e.g. Brazil or Urugay is awfully cheap nowadays, but calling from Brazil or Urugay to Germany is still expensive. Alright, I can initiate the calling a couple of times each day, but sometimes we like getting called by our beloved ones or business friends, and then it it's simple nice and/or necessary, that it's cheap to call overseas from within Brazil at a Brazilian telephone number. Got it?

Skype starts offering SIP

I found these rather interesting news today in my e-mail from Skype.
(When I tried to read more on this on Skype.com, I found that T-Mobile currently seems to block accesses to that domain. Of course that did not stop me from doing so, but I don't think, that's a good and gentile draw on T-Mobile's side. I consider this kind of censorship rather childish.)
But further on the SIP issue!
Right now Skype offers you a subscription, that costs you n times EUR 4.95 per month, where n is the number of channels resp. maximal concurrent connections resp. "calls" you want to be able to use resp. have, incoming and outgoing calls count the same.
Right now that's nothing I want to go for, as I don't even have a "incoming Skype telephone number" (I don't want pour money on a steady monthly into yet another sink for services I don't really, really need), but I assume sooner or later, they let us dial out through SIP on a per call basis, just as they currently let me dial out on a per call basis using their proprietary software on Windows, Mac OS X or "whatever"; there they let me display my mobile phone number as "the caller", that's fair enough, I don't ask for more. I have been waiting with "all of us" for Skype to act as a SIP provider for quite a while, I am quite able to wait for that next step for another (short?) while. One step is done, the next steps will follow ...
If you search for "Skype SIP" on twitter.com, you will find, that Skype have been publishing that news on markets other than Germany at least for 4 days (as of 2010-01-05).

sipgate's SIP client for the iPhone

sipgate.de re-announced their SIP client for the iPhone on the 2009-10-30.
Downloaded it, started it, nice.
It can of course make us of my address book on the iPhone.
I'm not sure, I would want to use SIP over UMTS (if they don't restrict that anyways as Skype does), but for telephone over WiFi, that's pretty nice.