Roll Your Own: Asterisk + Google Voice = Free Calling

In an earlier post I promised a how-to for how I used Asterisk and Google Voice to get a Home Phone, so here goes…

First of all, if you’re not much of the command-line tinkering type, and you have an internet-accessable box you can start from scratch with, you really might want to check out the Nerd Vittles solution that inspired and guided me in rolling my own.

If you’re not a tinkerer, but you don’t have a start-from-scratch box available, you can probably get away with following along through the installation of Asterisk here, and then pop FreePBX on to your Asterisk install to get a nice GUI for doing your configuration. I’ve personally never used FreePBX, so I can’t speak to how easy it would make things, etc.

If you’re still reading, we need to make sure you have a few things before we go forward.

Prerequisites

• Root-access to an Internet-Accessable *nix box^*1,2
• A free sipgate one account
• A free Google Voice account
• A SIP Phone of some sort. (More on this later, but know free software phones are available for any OS you might be using)

1 – Concerning Internet-Accessability: Your best bet is a box with a public IP (i.e. no NAT). SIP and NAT don’t play well at all, so it’s best to just avoid the mess as much as possible. There are work-arounds, but nothing that’s really great.
2 – Concerning *nix flavours: This how-to is written from my experiences using Gentoo Linux. I’ve also run Asterisk on Ubuntu and Debian, and many people run it on CentOS. It can also run on Mac OS X, but will require the Developer Tools, and probably some packages not included with OS X by default.

Now that we know what we need to get going, here’s a quick overview of what we’re going to do:

1. Install Asterisk and other tools
2. Configure sipgate and Google Voice
3. Configure Asterisk for Google Voice calling
4. Verify

Let’s get started… (continue)