Sounds like I'm promoting them. I can assure everyone I have no association with them nor with the fine people at Obi central. The price is right and I thought other Obi users might want to know about this. Very easy to setup on the Obi.
This is for the people in Canada who want an inexpensive SIP account that works great with the Obi. You get a choice of DIDs from the major cities in Canada. There are more features with their voip service. You guys can read about it yourself on their site if you like.
By the way, if you live in Canada you might not know that you can not get Google voice here. At least not without some effort. All Google voice activations are sent to USA numbers only. There seems to be a glitch with the Google voice activation process. Somehow they forgot to block area code 403. This is an area code for Calgary, Canada.
The neat thing about Freephoneline, you can call forward unconditionally, on busy, on no answer. To activate your Google voice account in Canada get yourself a free 403 area code number with them. Set it up so that it forwards to a telephone you can answer. Then follow through with the Google voice activation process. They have their own softphone which works with their SIP account. With some tweaking you can also manage to use their accounts on an Asterisk box. That's for another forum.
Of course, it's not that easy. Google also blocks Canadian IPs. To get around this, get yourself a VPN service that offers USA IPs. I've noticed that many people are using Hotspot Shield. I find that there are too many ads popping up with that product after you install it. I found a VPN service called proXPN (
http://proxpn.com/). Both products get you an IP in the USA. Both are free. (As an aside we can also watch Hulu with this VPN service from Canada. This is also blocked)
This opens up a whole new market for the Obi. Now Canadians can enjoy the Google voice service by making free calls within North America. Enjoy it while it lasts. Without this how to, a lot of potential Canadian Obi users might not be able to use one of the more interesting features of the unit. Think of the money you could be saving with a practically free DID number which offers 2 channels, and free long distance calls. What's not to like about this combination. This opportunity offered to us with a low cost ATA type device.
Edit: Modified Subject title