Google Voice for non-U.S. Residents

Go on admit it, you’re po’d that Google Voice (GV) is available to people living in the United States only. It may be for friends or business interests, whatever the reason the ability to call U.S. telephones (both fixed and mobile) for absolutely zip, zero, nada appeals to you. Conversely, U.S. residents can also contact you without incurring international rates.

Having your own U.S. phone number gives you a “presence” in that part of the world and to those who might call that number, you are for all intents and purposes, answering as if in the U.S.! And to make it even sweeter you get to select exactly where in the U.S. your number is located. New York, San Francisco or Biloxi, Mississippi , it’s up to you. Then when you dial using GV, the Caller ID displayed to the recipient shows the number and geographic region you selected. If only you were in the U.S. to take advantage of it .

But wait! for four easy payments of $26.99 + shipping…. ok, ok I’m kidding… I couldn’t help it.  Here’s how you do it for free…

If you know a little about SIP and VOIP continue reading, otherwise grab your nearest geek and ask that person to read this post!

The very first hurdle you have to clear is to request a GV account. Do that by going to the GV invitation page and use your gmail account where requested. In a few days you should receive an email back inviting you to Google voice service. “Hold on!”,  you say, “don’t GV know I’m not in the U.S.? Why bother?”  They don’t check at request time, that’s why, and it’s not going to know as I’ll explain.

Fast forward a few days and great, you have an invite, but in your haste you clicked the link they gave you but got a message saying Google Voice is only for U.S. residents currently. You got that message because the geo-location of your I.P. was recognized as non-U.S. so the next thing you’ll need to do is login to a proxy within the U.S. before you can proceed any further. You probably already know some working proxies in the U.S. and if you do please mention them in the comments below for the benefit of us all. If you don’t you might need to use a commercial one for a while which costs very little in any case. If you read my post about Pandora on my blog you’ll find the one I used mentioned there.

On to the next gotcha. Before you try to use your GV invite check before you click the invitation link that you really are on a proxy. Use a service such as WhatIsMyIP to verify the location is reported as within the U.S. And another big one – clear your browser of cookies, very important! If Google finds it’s own cookie(s) in your cache reporting a locale other than the U.S. it will go by those and not the proxy location. So just make sure your cookie cache is cleared.

Now if you’ve done all that, go ahead, click the invite and GV will guide you through the setup of your number, your voice mail settings and all the other features (including free send/receive texting!). It’s all well-documented at the GV site which will become visible to you at this point.

Hold your questions for a moment now, I’ll deal with them shortly, just stick to the steps in this guide and it’ll become clearer to you as we progress.

If you’ve been following along in a set by step manner, you’ll find another big Gotcha at this point. GV requires a U.S. number for forwarding purposes and for validation. Curses! Why didn’t I tell you, this is a chicken and egg situation and a waste of time! Well it’s not.

Now there may be lots of argument about big government going on in the U.S. at the moment, but for purpose of this exercise we love them and more particularly the Federal Communications Commission or FCC. Because of a quirky FCC requirement regarding rural phone line availability companies such as IP Kall exist. Basically IP Kall get a subsidy every time one of the phone numbers they control connects a call. And it didn’t take them long to figure out that if you used SIP for the call termination, more and more people could use their service and they would get correspondingly large subsidies. People who have a U.S. landline have a billing item for a “universal access fee” and we’re taking advantage of that program’s largess here! But that’s another story.

Go ahead and sign up for IP Kall (or similar, if you find others please leave them in the comments) and make sure it’s working. By working I mean that you can dial the number it assigned you and it rings back to your PC or ATA. Now you have a U.S. number that’s located in Washington state on the west coast, which in and of itself is quite useful, but not as useful as a GV number.

Go back to your GV setup and put the IP Kall number as your forwarding number. Google will now dial that number which will then ring at whatever device/softphone is logged into your SIP account. Google will ask you to key in a confirmation code and then you’re good to go! Be careful that you have the correct DTMF settings too, you might have to play with that a little.

If you so wish you can then go the GV dashboard and add a free Gizmo account as a forwarding number which is also very useful as it can forwand an incoming call to SIP, Skype or GTalk.

Once you have all the setup done you can dispense with the proxy, in other words, GV does not check location during usage, only at signup time. In addition, the IP Kall number will expire after 30 days of inactivity, but with GV you can dial it for free so there’s no excuse for that.

How you use it after this is up to you, I like to use it via the SIP client on my Nokia E71 as well as  my Linksys PAP2 ATA.

In summary:

• Obtain GV Invite
• Sign up for Gizmo5
• Sign up for IP Kall
• Register GV using a US proxy
• Enjoy!

Remember Google Voice is still a Beta product and subject to change. All comments welcome.

Tagged as: America, google voice, gv, non-US, outside, sip, USA, voip