Mar 3, 2011

VoIP for MacOS 10.6: XMeeting and sipgate

Free SIP VoIP-clients on MacOS 10.6 are a species of software quite complicated to hunt down. Since I have a sipgate-account and wanted to use it on my Mac as well, I found Xmeeting. Unfortunately, configuration of it is not necessarily straight forward and definitely not Mac-like "just works". Here are some hints how to configure XMeeting correctly:

You will need the SIP-ID and your SIP-Password of your sipgate-account ready, which you can get from the section "Settings" of the sipgate website.

Download and install XMeeting as usual by dragging and dropping the executable to the programs folder on your Mac. Then start the application. Switch from the installation wizard to the detailed view by clicking exactly this button.

In the dialogue window, set your displayed name in the "General"-section.

In the "Accounts"-Section add a SIP Registrar Account by clicking the "Plus"-Button below the SIP section. In the following window, set the Display Name as you like, the Reg. Domain must be sipgate.com (or if you happen to have a German account: sipgate.de), the User name must be your SIP-ID, as well as the Authorization User Name, and you password must be your SIP-password (which is NOT the password for opening your account on www.sipgate.com, but shown at the "Settings" site on sipgate.com).

Then change to "Locations", Create a location and name it appropriately. In the subsection "Network", set a bandwidth limit according to the quality of your connection, and add a STUN Server which is stun.sipgate.net:10000. Then advance to the part SIP, check: "Enable SIP" and check the SIP account you created before.

In a standard configuration now your SIP account should work fine and you should be able to make and receive calls. If not, you might need to change your router's settings according to the help section of sipgate and/or TCP/IP settings in the Network section.

If you happen to have another sip provider, please check out the settings and servers on their website, XMeeting should work with it, too.