bridging pstn line to google voice

[moose]

I'm trying to bridge a physical land line at a remote site to my google voice line s.t. GV will work normally and any inbound call on the pots line will route into GV and ring all of the phones registered with the GV account.

Current setup is:

GV successfully setup on obi's SP1. Am able to make outbound GV calls using a handset connected to the obi's PHONE port and using **1 to select the GV trunk for the outbound call. InboundCallRoute rule is "PH" and inbound calls to the GV line will ring the handset connected to the OBI's phone port as well as all other phones associated with the GV account.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to successfully handle inbound calls from the pots line.

I have the tried using both the InboundCallRoute and CallForwardUnconditional rules on the obi's physical LINE interface. e.g. {SP1(accountName)} for LINE's ICR or SP1(accountName) in the forward rule where "accountName" is my GV login name without the @gmail.com. With either of these configurations and with both Google Chat and another phone line associated with the GV account enabled, any calls to the pots line will be seen as an inbound call in gmail chat app but the phones associated with the google voice account never ring and the inbound caller only hears continuous ringing - GV voicemail never picks up. This is the case whether or not I'm logged into gmail at the time of the inbound call.

In the OBI's call history for inbound calls on the pots line, I see: TERM: LINE1, DIRECTION: Inbound, Time: Ringing and TERM: GoogleVoice1, PEER NUMBER: <gvAccountName>, DIRECTION: Outbound.

Any suggestions on how to make calls routed via the GV trunk look more like inbound calls to GV s.t. all of the associated phones will ring and GV voicemail will function??

Thanks for any suggestions.

[RonR]

You can't call your Google Voice number through the OBi's Google Voice trunk.  That will access your Google Voice voicemail account (try calling your Google Voice number from the OBi's phone through SP1).

You could set up a second Google Voice account on SP2 and use it forward PSTN calls to your original Google Voice account's number which will then appear as a normal incoming call to the original Google Voice account.  CallerID will always show the second Google Voice account's number, however.

[moose]

Hey RonR,

Thanks for the reply.

In my original setup that's exactly what I was trying - forwarding the the GV number with the trunk enabled and exactly as you described, inbound calls to the pots line would try to drop into GV voicemail as clearly it was being seen by GV as an inbound "call" from the GV number itself. However, in this case, I'm not actually forwarding to a specific number, just the trunk's account name. Dunno the significance of this difference to the obi but under these circumstances the inbound caller just hears ringing and GV never responds by dropping into voicemail so the two situations seem different.

I did notice that the gmail app (if up) sees the inbound call regardless of the state of the "forward to chat" setting in GV so maybe the "ring all lines" processing in GV is only performed on a true inbound call rather than through a registered connection like that being maintained by the obi with GV??

Thanks for the second GV number idea - I can probably live with the caller id limitation just seems a shame to have yet another forward just to get GV to ring all of the connected devices and not just gmail chat app.

Regards.

[RonR]

I just tried a Speed Dial from one OBi to another using a Google Voice username as the number and Google Voice rejects the call:

10  SP1(username)

I've never seen anything to indicate that you can call the same or another Google Voice account by username through an OBi.

[moose]

I was starting from the following:

http://www.obitalk.com/forum/index.php?topic=956.0

which I just noticed was one of your posts from May. However, when I reread it it sounds like this is still resulting in the call being forwarded. Clearly for some reason forwarding "to" the trunk looks different to GV than using it to place an outbound call. (as GV responds differently in these two cases)

Clearly my approach is not working - just trying to reason out why.

Thanks again.

[RonR]

Google Voice does not use SIP protocol and behaves differently from typical VoIP accounts.

SIP/VoIP accounts can usually be called via SIP URI using SPx(username@hostname), assuming SPx is configured for SIP.