JUST RELEASED: Visit the Incredible PBX Wiki
It’s been a death by a thousand cuts, but today marks the end of the Google Voice era with Asterisk®. Since Google removed XMPP support and transitioned to their new GVSIP platform, many have held out hope that Google hadn’t moved to a purely commercial platform with their ObiHai deal. Yesterday, the head of the Google Voice project requested that all Asterisk GVSIP implementations be discontinued citing Google’s Terms of Service. We hinted this was coming back in July and have reproduced our tweet below. We have since removed all of our articles pertaining to GVSIP, and we would encourage all of our readers to honor Google’s wishes and move on. We’ve made it easy with a $50 gift certificate from Skyetel (expires March 31, 2019). It will buy you many months of free VoIP service.
You still have several options with your Google Voice trunks. First, you can forward all incoming calls to Google Voice to another phone or DID of your choosing. This costs you nothing other than a minute to set it up. Second, you can port out your Google Voice number to another provider. Skyetel will cover your porting expense at their end during your first 60 days of service. Google charges $3 to port out your number unless you originally ported it into Google in which case it is free. Here’s how. Although we’re not big fans, a third option is to purchase an OBi200 device and continue to use your Google Voice trunk with Asterisk. Our tutorial from last May will show you how. Effective 10/1/2023, $25/month minimum spend at Skyetel is required.
As we’ve mentioned often, the beauty of VoIP is not having to put all of your telephony eggs in a single basket. Google’s latest move reinforces how important it actually is to configure several VoIP trunks on your server. While Skyetel and Vitelity are both excellent primary trunks and rarely experience an outage, it’s still a good idea to have a backup. VoIP.ms (free iNUM), CircleNet, CallCentric ($1/mo. DID and iNUM), LocalPhone (25¢/mo. iNUM), Future-Nine, AnveoDirect, and V1VoIP are excellent options. Most don’t cost you anything unless you make calls. Review our complete SIP tutorial here: Developing a Cost-Effective SIP Strategy.
Dale Carnegie Award: ObiHai Man of the Year
Originally published: Friday, November 16, 2018
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Special Thanks to Vitelity. Vitelity is now Voyant Communications and has halted new registrations for the time being. Our special thanks to Vitelity for their unwavering financial support over many years and to the many Nerd Vittles readers who continue to enjoy the benefits of their service offerings. We will keep everyone posted on further developments.
Localphone iNum is not free any more.
[WM: Fixed. Thanks.]
The problem with removing your articles is there is now no written process to remove GVSIP from a PBX in an orderly manner.
[WM: /root/gvsip-naf/del-trunk will let you delete any existing trunks you have. Renaming /etc/asterisk/pjsip_custom.conf to pjsip_custom.conf.old will remove GVSIP support from Asterisk once you issue: amportal restart.]
I just switched my default search engine to duckduckgo. I feel if they want to track me and resell my information then I am entitled to a little bit of compensation. In other words, I should be able to use googlevoice on my home asterisk server. I may not like duckduckgo; however, I’m willing to give it a try. Next is gmail migration. . .
Dead? RIP? Nah, as long as there are users there will always be a fix.
Fixed mine already and my gvsip trunks are registered and online yet again.
https://interbiznw.com/2018/11/17/asterisk-gvsip-google-voice-broken/
The biggest problem for me is that I still use my GV number for SMS on my cell.
What services can I move to that will work with ipbx and still let me use the sms on my android?
[WM: See our SMS tutorial for VoIP.ms. That’s probably the easiest option, and messages are free.]
So this is why my gvsip just stopped working? This sucks😩.
Only had it setup so I had a landline for kids when we weren’t home. Never got much use. How far would that 50.00 credit go in a situation like this?
[WM: DIDs are a dollar a month and calls are about a penny a minute. You can take it from there.]
Whatever. I love Google Voice, true "VOIP" or not. All I care about are the benefits of the service, which are many. Your misleading headline makes it sound like it’s closing shop. It’s NOT and thank God for that!
Google is no longer the company we grew up with.
RIP
While painful like most config changes in asterisk, I’ve successfully moved off GV. Still I need to find an eventual solution for SMS. Looks like the implementations that exist are for specific providers (and not the new one I picked! – Twilio) Thanks for your feedback on these issues over the last year.
Google Voice is back up as of 11/20/2018
I have started moving away from google myself, switching from chrome to firefox, switching from google from search to mystatepage.com, GV and my last switch over will be email. Has anyone used proton email? Think I’m going to end up porting my GV number to voip.ms I tried them out and have not had any issues with them yet.
I thought thought I saw something about the FCC trying to push out something to block caller ID spoofing, guess that’s the next big disruptive thing that’s going to happen. The only reason I use that on my end at the moment is to make it look like my voip.ms is my GV number on outgoing calls but soon as that gets ported over no biggie I guess.
Ward,
How much support will you be lending to the OBi200 and OBi202 in the future?
I would love to see an article for the home/office user highlighting the RPi-3 attaching to the OBi units with GV and any other VoiP suppliers.
A simple straight forward setup.
I just purchased an OBi200 for my son’s home since the demise of GVSIP so that he can still use the same GV number without worry for a long time to come.
I want to put the RPi-3 behind it to protect from unwanted calls and to notify when there is a power failure since I wrote .callout scripts to interface to the APC UPS system.
Thanks for all the great work you and your team do!
I’ve been around with you since the AAH days and still write BASH/HTML scripting for your systems.
Retired for the last 5 years now and just tinker.
Thanks Again!
TomS (Tom Schmitt)
I just saw that Google Voice is going to be 💯% VoIP. Will that make it work with incrediblepbx again?
[WM: I doubt it. Some proprietary VoIP flavor would be my guess. But time will tell.]