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Technical details about Obihai

Started by D_D_, April 20, 2017, 07:36:35 PM

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D_D_

I am considering getting Obihai 202, and was looking for some technical details. Could not find them on the site, so I would appreciate if tech support could help:

1. Is it possible to configure Obihai 202 directly, without going through Obitalk cloud server, and without creating an account on the server. If so, could you point me to instructions for direct configuration?

2. Once configured, does the Obihai unit require a connection to your server to function, and does it communicate any information, metadata, status or anything else to your servers or services.

Thanks for your help.

drgeoff

Quote from: D_D_ on April 20, 2017, 07:36:35 PM
I am considering getting Obihai 202, and was looking for some technical details. Could not find them on the site, so I would appreciate if tech support could help:

1. Is it possible to configure Obihai 202 directly, without going through Obitalk cloud server, and without creating an account on the server. If so, could you point me to instructions for direct configuration?

2. Once configured, does the Obihai unit require a connection to your server to function, and does it communicate any information, metadata, status or anything else to your servers or services.

Thanks for your help.

This is primarily a user-to-user forum and is not a recommended way to get official answers from Obihai.

1a.  If you only want to communicate with other OBi devices, no account, no registration on the portal nor configuration is required.  Just plug in and power up the Obi and dial **9 followed by the 9 digit Obi number of the distant Obi.  (A simple bit of configuration can remove the need for the **9 prefix.)

1b.  If you only want to use SIP ITSP(s), again you do not need an Obitalk account, nor registration on the portal.  All the configuration required can be performed by pointing a browser at the OBi's IP address on your LAN and accessing the OBi's onboard web GUI.

1c.  If you want to use Google Voice then you must configure that using the Obitalk portal.  That needs an account on the portal and device registration there.

2a.  Obi to Obi calls using the Obitalk service require access to some Obi server at least to lookup the IP address of the called OBi.  There is some evidence that the voice packets can travel directly between the two Obis but AFAIK this is not confirmed to be always the case.

2b.  There is no technical reason why calls via a SIP ITSP require any assistance from OBihai server(s).  There may be some reasons why an OBi device does occasionally contact the Obihai mothership.  You sound like a person who would be able to install a proxy/firewall that would constrain your OBi from communicating with anywhere other than your chosen ITSP(s).

2c.  As for Google Voice, I don't know if or how often, once GV is configured, contact with Obihai server(s) is required to continue making and receiving calls.


See the bottom of the http://www.obihai.com/docs-downloads page for the device example GUIs that you can try for yourself.

D_D_

Thank you for such a comprehensive reply. Greatly appreciate it.

I suspected that the forum, like most, is user-to-user, but the support page listed this as the "support forum". Also, the only other option was the tech support form, but it requires an obi serial #, so I could not use it for this type of pre-sales questions. Is there an option I missed?

It's good that for some setups the Obitalk A/c is not required. I am considering GV, so I am curious, why it is required for Google Voice? I would guess that there are settings needed for GV, which cannot be controlled directly  through the Obi device UI, but cannot understand why those settings could not be exposed through the UI. do you have any idea?

Thanks!


drgeoff

The use of the portal to configure GV on an OBi became necessary a few years ago when Google changed the authorisation method.  There are many old posts on the forum about that.

D_D_

Thanks for the info!

I stumbled upon some discussions indicating that Obi cannot be used when the primary GV email is non-gmail.com.

The most recent discussion I found was from 2 years ago, and I could not find whether this restriction has been removed in the interim... i.e. can obi work with non-gmail  Google Voice addresses?

Thanks!