07 June 2024
Ditching Google Voice for VOIP.MS
Sometimes calls got put straight to voicemail, sometimes it won’t make an outbound call and I had to switch to my Cell.
The problem with being unhappy with a free service is that every thing I seriously considered was a lot more expensive. Recently a friend recommended voip.ms – 3500 residential minutes per month for $4.25 + 1.50 for E911 and SMS for less than a penny a message.
Of course there is a catch, while voip.ms has great features, it is a very raw, no nonsense SIP product, with a lot of features. Where GV worked in any web browser and had an app for my cell, I was going to need to replace those pieces.
Setting Up My VOIP.MS Account
As soon as you’ve created the primary SIP (which you’re never going to use), carefully review the Account Settings, go through each tab. There was a field needed that wasn’t filled automatically when I enrolled. The good news is that their support was easy to reach via chat and quickly directed me to the setting that was missing. You’ll need to pick from a long list which proxy you’re going to use for your primary SIP, you’ll probably want to stick to it, if you want to use extensions they all need to be on the same proxy. When I set up the service I allowed them to assign me a number, it takes a few days to port in your number, and I wasn’t going to initiate a transfer until I was satisfied.
If there is a device active (registered) on your primary SIP none of your others will ring. You’ll have to create your main SIP, but don’t plan on using it. As soon as you finish setup create a sub-account for each device you plan to use, I have a VOIP Adapter, a client on my main desktop, and client on my smartphone. When you create your SIPs select Encrypted. I initially setup without, but then had to reconfigure each client, and a flaw of their interface is that every time you edit a sub account SIP you have to set a new password for it.
Setting up VoiceMail, Ring Group and IVR
You can upload recordings, when configuring your Voice Mail you can select one of these or do the normal Voice Mail setup to record a greeting, you can choose to transcribe and email messages, and to delete them after sending.
To have more than one device answer a number, you’ll have to setup a Ring Group and assign each of your sub-account SIPs to it. Assign your DID to point to your Ring Group.
Optionally you may want to set up an IVR for call screening. When GV screened my calls the phone would ring once, and I would still end up answering a call that was disconnected. I created two extensions in the IVR, one for the Ring Group and one to go straight to Voice Mail. The greeting on my IVR directs callers to select either of these extensions, most current robots won’t be able to select the right choice and my phone won’t ring. There is an option to upload contacts and automatically bypass the IVR for them. I also created a more aggressive IVR that doesn’t announce the ring through mailbox, but decided not to use it since I’d need to give out an extension with my number.
wiki.voip.ms has a library of instructions for popular devices and softphones.
Setting up My Adapter
When I went to setup my VOIP adapter, I discovered that PolyCom had End of Lifed it, the GrandStream 801 device is so inexpensive that I ended up replacing my EOL Obi 200 device after some initial testing with it.
VOIP Clients
The most important client for me is that the Phone Adapter., but it’s nice to be able to have the headphones on the Computer and to be able to take my number on the go with my Cell. The good and bad news is you have to bring your own client. I was initially successful with Zoiper (not free). It integrated directly with my contacts, and worked on both the Linux Desktop and Mobile. When I upgraded my Mobile, the settings did not transfer over and I had difficulty getting it working, their tech support blamed voip.ms, and voip.ms worked with me to determine the problem was with the Zoiper configuration. I grabbed MizuDroid and configured it in five minutes rather than working through configuration screens on Zoiper to fix it. I’m not thrilled with MizuDroid, it seems like I have to have the application open in order for it to work, where Zoiper was listening for calls all the time.
What Isn’t Great
Two Factor Authentication
Some institutions requiring Two Factor Authentication require that a number be serviced by a recognized mobile provider and won’t allow VOIP numbers for texting, but they may allow it for Phone Me 2FA. If you have an IVR setup you will need to either find out the number they call from and add it to your VOIP.ms phonebook or you will need to remove the number from your IVR to allow the 2FA to happen, then resume IVR.
On the other side of 2FA, I had set it up, only to eventually get locked out of my account. It looked like a time drift issue as the window to enter the code from my device got shorter and shorter until I was unable to login at all.
Phone Book
To have numbers bypass your IVR you have to import them to the VOIP.ms Phonebook. Their format is 3 fields [‘Speed Dial’, ‘Name’, ‘Number’]. You can leave the Speed Dial Field empty if you don’t use it, but you need to begin with an empty field in your csv. Phone Number must be only digits. Finally, if contacts have multiple numbers, you’ll need to import each as a different name (ie ‘John Karr VOIP’, ‘John Karr CELL’). To refresh your phone book, you’ll need to export your contacts, you can use this GIST for my current python script to cleanup. To do a fresh import you must delete your old phonebook first. If you have two contacts who share a number, there will be a duplicate error. When you click ok on the error, don’t click import again, verify that the numbers are present. The only use I have for the Phone Book is for IVR bypass for recognized numbers. I could also use it to setup a block list, by creating a blocked group, this would be a multi-step every time a number has to be blacklisted and isn’t nearly as convenient as the equivalent is in the phone or messages app.
The script I wrote to help with the phonebook import is up on a GIST.
SMS
While SMS and RCS are supported, and inexpensive, when you count up the OTP messages you get in a day, it definitely costs more than the free messaging I had with GV and that I get on my Mobile. Interfacing with SMS is more cumbersome. I have email forwarding setup, so a copy of all SMS goes into a dedicated folder in email. Unfortunately, the SMS messages don’t thread in the inbox. VOIP.MS have a web interface, which requires opening their site, going through login and captcha every session, the interface isn’t great. When I’m using my Mobile, the VOIP.MS android app (created by one of their users, not them) works fairly well, it can read my contacts. I’ve found that often times long messages and image attachments don’t work. Overall the experience is much inferior to Google Voice, and I’ve been favoring my Mobile for texting, since once I’ve signed into Google on a browser I can just open the Google Messages Web App, I find myself preferring to use my Mobile number for text, even responding to messages sent to my voip line there.