VOIP for the iPhone (Tested with Voipuser)
Written by gray on Apr 15, 2008 - 07:05 PM
Fring are the first to market a public VoIP application for the iPhone.
Boldly, they've taken a side-step around Apple and rather than wait for the new SDK to be released in June, they have released this "beta" for users that have already hacked ("JailBroken") their iPhone device.
You can download it by following the instructions here:-
http://www.fring.com/iphone/
It offers Skype, MSN, GTalk etc integration on the IM side, and offers calling via SkypeOut and SIP.
The SIP service works fine with VoIP User - we've tested that. Just enter your username and password in the relevant fields and sip.voipuser.org for the registrar domain.
The client does not connect directly over SIP however. Packet-sniffing the traffic reveals that Fring are using a custom TCP/IP protocol to connect to the Fring network from where they have a SIP bridge to connect for the second leg of the call.
Running media over TCP is not a good idea. Whilst it makes firewall traversal easy, the overhead of TCP means you can expect a good 200ms-1000ms of latency. Those of you with hacked iPhones can test this out for yourself with a VoIP User account.
SIP works and other than the delay the audio quality is reasonable. SkypeOut in our testing was particularly poor quality.
So it needs some improvements to be truly usable. They are first to open market in this game though and time will prove whether or not they were right in their decision to go against the wishes of the mighty Apple.
Boldly, they've taken a side-step around Apple and rather than wait for the new SDK to be released in June, they have released this "beta" for users that have already hacked ("JailBroken") their iPhone device.
You can download it by following the instructions here:-
http://www.fring.com/iphone/
It offers Skype, MSN, GTalk etc integration on the IM side, and offers calling via SkypeOut and SIP.
The SIP service works fine with VoIP User - we've tested that. Just enter your username and password in the relevant fields and sip.voipuser.org for the registrar domain.
The client does not connect directly over SIP however. Packet-sniffing the traffic reveals that Fring are using a custom TCP/IP protocol to connect to the Fring network from where they have a SIP bridge to connect for the second leg of the call.
Running media over TCP is not a good idea. Whilst it makes firewall traversal easy, the overhead of TCP means you can expect a good 200ms-1000ms of latency. Those of you with hacked iPhones can test this out for yourself with a VoIP User account.
SIP works and other than the delay the audio quality is reasonable. SkypeOut in our testing was particularly poor quality.
So it needs some improvements to be truly usable. They are first to open market in this game though and time will prove whether or not they were right in their decision to go against the wishes of the mighty Apple.
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