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GTalk2VoIP gateway Frequently Asked Questions
1. Q: What is GTalk2VoIP ?
A: GTalk2VoIP is a free and publicly open voice gateway for major Instant Messenger clients. It makes possible voice interoperability between Google Talk, MSN/Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and SIP phones without any additional software installation. Originally, the gateway was developed with Google Talk support only (and made calls to PSTN), from which it derived its name.
A: GTalk2VoIP stands for "GoogleTalk To Voice-over-IP" gateway which offers a number of voice services to GoogleTalk users. The idea is not only to provide cheap outgoing calls from GoogleTalk to ordinary telephone numbers, but make them even cheaper and of a highest possible quality by organizing publicly open voice traffic exchange. Every VoIP service provider can participate in traffic exchange offering call termination service for different destinations. As each service provider gives its own communication rates, or the voice quality differs, it gives a bit freedom of choice for users (GoogleTalk users). Thus, we orginized a service providers ranking system which can be effected by users' votes and some automatically calculating voice quality factors.
2. Q: Ok, how can I call Google Talk, MSN or Yahoo users from SIP ?
3. Q: How can I pay for services ?
A: Most of our services like voicemail, voice conferencing and SIP gatewaying are available free of charge, but some require payments to be made (like "Outgoing calls to phone numbers (PSTN)"). Detailed explaination on how to pay is available here.
3a. Q: What payment system do you accept ? Can I use PayPal or Google Checkout ?
A: Yes, we accept PayPal. Google Checkout will be added soon.
3b. Q: Do my credits expire ?
A: No, credits do not expire.
4. Q: What are those ranking effecting factors ?
A: There are plenty of them, but most valuable are: users' votes, Answer Seizure Ration and cost. The lower cost for a given destination and the higher ASR, the more probability is given to route your call through a certain service provider. ASR is a percentage of well placed calls to total calls routed through a service provider, which is calculated using pinalty-based algorithm.
5. Q: Why should voip service providers be interested to participate in your traffic exchange ?
A: There are so many GoogleTalk users wishing to call their friends in different countries. Due to some misfortune reasons calls to some well known countries like China, Russia or Iraq are too expensive to perform using ordinary telephony service. So people nowadays prefer to use Internet for communicating instead, thus originating loads of VoIP traffic which must be routed.
6. Q: Ok, I'm a GoogleTalk/Live or Yahoo Messenger user, how can I register to your service ?
A: There is no registration process. What you have to do is to submit your user id (gmail account name) to GTalk2VoIP voice gateway in one of the following ways: by inviting user to your friend list, or by submitting your user id from main page of this site.
A: Yahoo! Messenger users should add contact:
7. Q: How do I know cost/rate for my outgoing call to a certain destinations before calling?
A: The cost may vary depending on the service provider your call is routed to. There are two ways to figure out communication rates (costs) provided for a certain destination:
1. Type in COST phone command to in chat window. The system will respond with a table of rates. Example goes:
Ruslan: cost service: Welcome to GTalk to Telephone Gateway. Type 'HELP' for more information You entered: cost . Call to via PROXICOM costs 0.03 USD per 1 min Call to via RC costs 0.02 USD per 1 min
2. On your personal account page you can choose View communication rates, then enter a desired phone number or destination you would like to call to. After that, a similar table will be displayed.
8. Q: How do I know where (through which service provider) my outgoing call is routed to ?
A: After you initiate a call by issuing a CALL phone and accept an incoming voice call from , the following message will be displayed in chat window:
Ruslan: call service: Welcome to GTalk to Telephone Gateway. Type 'HELP' for more information You entered: call Incoming call from service: You have 99.9138 USD. Please, accept call from gtalk2voip !!! Thank you! Calling phone: via PROXICOM . Cost = 0.03 Call in progress...This means that your call was routed through PROXICOM who charges you 0.03 USD for each minute of talk. 9. Q: How do I access my personal account page ? Can't find link to it from your site.
A: To get a link to your personal account page you have to type in MYPAGE command in chat window to user . When you have done that, a link with a random cookie will be displayed to you. Click on the link to get into your account page. Please note, that this cookie is temporal and may expire after several days. In this case you have to repeat the procedure.
10. Q: I cannot hear any voice, when I'm trying I always get disconnected, reason = EndedByNoAccept.
A: This means that you are located behind a proxy or a very paranoid NAT/Firewall setup. Your Google Talk application cannot start media stream flowing. Either moderate your Firewall settings or ask your system administrator to setup a proper NAT service.
11. Q: How do I set up a conference between different IMs ?
A: Setting up conferenfing calls between different types of IM users is same as setting conf for same IM. One person uses CONF command to create a conferencing room and becomes room master, then sends invites (using INVITE command) to others, or gives out conf room cookie and others enter the room using JOIN command of service bot. Please read more details about conferecing.
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