Turning your OBi200 and OBi202 into an ITSP for Google Voice

There seems to be a lot of interest in Google Voice interfacing with our FreePBX systems and one is several hundred posts long! One was using an FXO card with an Obihai setup with GV and a couple “solutions” for turning an Obi into an ITSP for GV.

One of the “solutions” I tried was from NerdVittles which I never got to work. I could get my FreePBX to answer a call but it could never send a call with this solution. I posted a question on the forum about it seeking some thoughts. Anyway…

Some time ago I found this write up by Robert Stampfli and finally gave it a try.

https://cboh.org/voip/obi/OBi_As_ITSP.html

Piece of cake and it worked just fine with my Obi 200 and GV account.

John

If you are a VoIP/Voice/ITSP company and are using FreePBX for you customers, that’s great but relying on Google Voice for your customers as an “alternate and cheaper” solution is not at all recommended in any way. Google Voice has no guarantees, no SLAs, a very limited footprint across the US, no 911 support and the even more important no support in general. It never has and I’m guessing it never will.

When the Motif (XMPP) module was the main way to connect, it broke constantly because Google changed how their stuff worked and didn’t bother to tell people. It stayed broke until someone figured out what was changed, fixed it and pushed a module update.

Now XMPP is gone, people have played with patching Asterisk to connect over the new SIP platform. The other week, it broke because Google changed stuff (again) and people had to figure out what the change was and make a fix.

While you have the ATA’s and those might get around some of those woes, the service is not designed or meant to be anything more than a “forwarding service” for non-Google platform devices. There is a reason you have to associate your Google Voice number with an in service number from a real carrier.

It is in no way a business level solution.

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Good info Tom, but I found your post confusing as I never mentioned it to be a business voip service or business solution or meant for any business purpose…

I guess a lot of folks don’t know that…

John

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Turning your OBi200 and OBi202 into an ITSP for Google Voice

The implication is in the name you gave this thread. Now this very well could be a misuse of terminology due to not knowing and just relaying what was in the blog you linked. So to clarify the confusion.

ITSP stands for Internet Telephone Service Provider. Google Voice is an ITSP (in a broad sense). Many higher level ITSPs/Carriers supply services to wholesalers. Many of which use FreePBX to connect their customers. In many instances those wholesale ITSPs have used Google Voice as their “upstream provider” to the PSTN.

Many “lower level” ITSPs think that FreePBX + Vitelity (or VoIP Innovations, etc) makes them an ITSP. They have “trunks” to the PSTN and a PBX that their end users can connect to. Add the old school hack of A2Billing and boom ITSP In A Box ™ you’re a provider.

So your thread topic has implications of FreePBX + OBi200’s + Google Voice = You’re an ITSP now.

RonR has a well-explained how-to for turning a raspberry pi 3 ($35) into a pbx which includes Google Voice (free calls in US/Canada; 1 cent per minute calls to many places in Europe): https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30661088-PBX-FreePBX-for-the-Raspberry-Pi

I have been using my raspberry pi gvsip for the past 4 - 5 months. If you follow RonR’s thread, any problems can quickly be taken care of (I’ve run into only one, which took about a minute to fix). This system is for the home, not a business. You can always add another trunk (with Callcentric, etc.) if you have any doubts about Google Voice.

By the way, you don’t have to use Obi ata for the gvsip; you can use any sip phone you like. I am using the old Obi 100 as an ATA right now. By the way, I have been using Google Voice for my home phone for more than 10 years – with a brief hiatus when Google changed GV to a sip format (that’s when I switched to using freepbx and raspberry pi.

RonR uses raspian stretch as the OS.

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