How To: Make Free VOIP Calls with Google Voice and SIP

As most of you know, I’m currently out of the country. I wanted a way to stay in touch with family and friends without costing anyone a fortune. Fortunately, technology came to the rescue!

The setup:
1) Free Google Voice Account. I set my US mobile number to forward to this before I left, so even people that don’t know my Google Voice number can reach me.
2) Free Sipgate SIP account with a phone number. I added this number to google voice, and have it set to forward all calls to it by default.
3) iPhone 4 (Can be any iPhone really), running iOS 4
4) Acrobits Softphone ($7.99 in the app store + $9.99 for the G729 codec for 3g calls).
5) GV Mobile. This app requires a jailbroken iPhone (for now; GV Mobile+ should be coming to the App store soon!). While the free version it is a bit broken, the paid version GV Mobile+ works flawlessly. Both work great for my purposes as a dialer with access to the iPhone’s onboard phonebook. Before I could jailbreak the iPhone 4, I was using google voice’s *old* mobile website. The new website tries to dial directly using GSM, which doesn’t work for this application.

The video above is a quick demo of how it works on this side for both making and receiving calls. Hope this helps some people figure out the process; it’s pretty darn cool that this is even possible!

PS: Once GV Mobile+ gets released on the App store and Jailbreaking isn’t needed for this anymore I’ll put up a full tutorial on how to get everything setup and working together!