Google Voice, and the case of the missing callbacks

I have recently fallen in love with Google Voice.  Being a long-time user of Skype, I was concerned about stability and voice quality, but the advantages of Google Voice seemed to good to ignore.

Very soon, I found myself using Google Voice almost exclusively for making and receiving calls when I am sitting in front of my computer.  BTW, the international call rates with Google Voice are much cheaper than Skype.

A few weeks ago, an annoying problem cropped up.  Mysteriously,  I stopped getting calls on Google Chat.  This meant that I could neither receive Google Voice calls in my browser, nor could I make Google voice calls on my computer without involving another device.

My immediate workaround was to install a Sip client on my computer called Sipgate , so I could continue to receive and make calls solely on my computer (More on Sipgate and Google Voice in another post).

Being both curious and frustrated, I searched the Google Voice forums to solve the mystery of my missing Google Chat callbacks. I got a few responses, but none of them helped.  Fortunately, I stumbled across a blog by Justin Juberti, a Google Voice developer and asked for his assistance.

Justin did some investigating into my case and informed me that an instance of Asterisk (a software PBX) was logging into my Google Chat account and had given itself a higher priority than the standard Google Chat client, thereby intercepting all my incoming Google Chat voice calls.  I was very lucky Justin did that, because there is no straightforward way to gather that information as a mere user of Google Voice and Chat sevices.

However, I was mystified at first, because I hadn't used Asterisk in over 2 years. I had no idea where this instance of Asterisk could be.

Then I remembered a brief software dialog when I installed the application SipDroid on my Android phone.  SipDroid is a popular open source SIP client for Android phones. During the installation process, SipDroid automatically created an account  for me on Pbxes.org, which provides free hosting of Trixbox/Asterisk.

I logged into the Pbxes.org account that SipDroid had created for me and voila!  The mystery was solved.

I discovered that SipDrioid had generated a "trunk" that was configured to stay logged into my Google Chat account.  I looked at the call history of the trunk and I saw where all my missing Google Chat callbacks had gone.

I deleted the trunk and suddenly Google Chat callbacks worked again!  BTW, Pbxes.org has a straightforward interface for basic tasks, so finding and deleting the trunk was very easy to do.

I am keeping my Pbxes.org account, but I don't see any reason to involve Asterisk into the Google Voice mix. At least for now.

I have posted this information on the Google Voice forums, so other people can avoid my pain.

The silver lining out of this problem was discovering SipGate,  a valuable accessory for your Google Voice toolkit which I will write about soon.