Free working local phone number trick

This is a guide on how to use Google voice and a free incoming phone number provider in order to attain free incoming and outgoing calls. This is mostly theory, but I have tested the major parts myself, and this does work. This will require some knowledge of how to setup a sip phone and make calls.

Google Voice

First thing to do is attain an free google voice account.

Google voice will give you a free local area phone number.

This number itself does not allow you to make free calls in or out. What it does is this:

When you log in to your google voice account you will need to specify another number that you have access to, which will allow you to answer it(more on this later).

When you enter a phone number that you wish to call from inside of gvoice, it will then dial that number, and also at the same time call your personal number, then bridge or link the two calls together.

 <you>---<gvoice>---<third party> 

The local phone number provided from google, also works the same if someone calls that number. It will ring the google provided local number, then forward the call to your number that you provided to gvoice.

The Trick

There are probably other sites out there for this, but this is the one I have used. Http://ipkall.com

This site will provide you with a 100% free phone number for the washington state area. This number is only free for incoming calls, and will NOT allow you to have outgoing calls. Also this number, as I mentioned is only in washington state.

Here is what you do:

Get your ipkall number, get a gvoice account.

Get a sip client for your machine, such as xlite(windows or linux).

Connect the sip client to the ipkall service, and make sure you can receive calls, and that audio works both ways(there are problems with sip over NAT, that can arise but is not covered in the scope of this article).

In gvoice, when asked for you personal phone number, provide the number from ipkall. Gvoice will verify the number by calling you to make sure you can indeed receive calls on this number, and that it is yours.

Thats it your done. To make a call out enter a phone number from inside of gvoice that you wish to dial, here is what will happen:

gvoice will call the third party, then call your free incoming number from ipkall, and bridge your connections.

simple as that. If you wanted to perhaps put Asterisk(open source pbx) between you and your sip client, and use the google API to write some cgi that would allow for you to make calls out with no need to login to gvoice to do so, please feel free, and it would be great if you wanted to post your code or examples here.