N95 gets free international VoIP calls

I tried the latest VoIP server from Truphone on my N95. It’s in Beta 3 and very promising. Truphone is a brand new piece of free software that brings VoIP to your mobile. If you sign up before 30th September 2007, you’ll get free calls to 1.6 billion landlines worldwide for the rest of the year.

To install the VoIP software you need send SMS “Tur” to the number +44 7624 000 000 to get the WAP url. I kinda don’t like this. I still want to have option download the software and install it via USB cable. More control that way. However, the once clicked the URL came from the SMS, the download was surprisely fast, which means the software has really small footprint, considering I’m using the slow T-WebInternet. There are quite a few “Next” and “Continue” before completing the installation.

One caveat. Once the software installed, it sets itself in auto-start mode. Meaning it’s always on at background. You know your N95, the limited memory is not that accommodating. So you need go to Option to turn it off if you are just testing it.

Once it connected. It works just fine. Of cause, the connection has a lot to do with the sound quality. I need test it more using different connecting points.

Truphone does have something new. For one, it has this free SMS over IP. How it works? They have all the answers for the geeks.

Truphone calls are routed via Wi-Fi using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), as shown below. The RTP proxy deals with the Network Address Translation (NAT) used by firewalls, and with transcoding from the Adaptive Multi-Rate (AMR) codec used in the phone to G.711 if required for transmission to the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) via the SIP router. The handset software is written in C++ on the Symbian operating system.

They are big on opensource.

The major telecoms components are:

• OpenSER: Open Source SIP server
• Asterisk: Open source SIP PBX
• FreeSWITCH: Open source software telephony application

Other components that we use are:

• Apache Tomcat Servlet Container
• MySQL Databases
• Debian Linux Build
• Spring, Hibernate, JSF, Shale - Clay, Acegi for the web site build
• Roller for blogging
• Nagios and Monit for status monitoring
• OTRS for trouble-ticketing
• Jira for bug tracking