Webphone from Vodafone Portugal

Vodafone Portugal launched a service that can help you saving some costs in roaming, when you are connected to the Internet with your laptop: a softphone that can make and receive calls using the normal cellphone number.


How it works?

To start using the software it is necessary to download it from Vodafone Portugal webpage, and install it on the Windows PC (so far I am not aware that this can be installed on MAC or Linux).

The installation is very easy and is based on a wizard. Then, after executing the application a dialog box will ask the phone number and the password. The phone number is the regular mobile phone number in the Portuguese format, and the password is the same that is used to access the MyVodafone website. If the user does not have a password in MyVodafone can just apply for one online.

After inserting the login data, the system will ask for a password that is delivered to the phone by SMS. It is mandatory to input the password delivered by SMS, otherwise the application will not login into the network. This is used to increase the security level, and is only necessary the first few days. After logging in the software works like a normal phone and you will be able to:

• Send SMS
• Send MMS
• Start calls/video calls, that will display your caller ID in the phone you are calling
• Receive calls/video calls, if the option is select at login time

This is a great application to use your phone number when overseas, and while connected to the internet. Technical Details This application is a normal SIP application customized for Vodafone by a company called Wit Software. This application has other extras other than the SIP implementation:

• Send SMS and MMS
  
• Allow chat between users that use the application, technically based on Jabber.

If you want to use this service from another SIP client, or Virtual PBX, better forget about it, because Vodafone, for security reasons, changed the SIP protocol header fields: the fields From/To/Contact are encrypted with a custom implementation.

It would be nice to use my Portuguese phone number over the 3G network here in Singapore, but Vodafone made it a bit difficult but not impossible.


Free calls

On 26-February-2008 Vodafone offered free calls to their network,if the calls would be initiated from the webphone. But, apparently their system was down when I was trying to use it, and I tried at several different hours in the day. Maybe their system could not handle the load or... my Internet Service Provider did something. But, I was receiving a SIP error 504: Gateway Timeout after sniffing the traffic on my network.

UPDATE: 3-March-2008
It seems the problem I had was not related with the load on their system. After exchanging a few emails with Vodafone Data Support, and trying some of their suggestions, I figured out that the application cannot login when the "Forward calls to my computer" option is activated. If I deactivate this option, the application logs in and I can use it to call. However, I cannot receive calls on the application. But, if I divert the calls in my phone to +351661xxxxxxxxx where is xxxxxxxxx is my phone number it works perfectly.
This problem was related to the call forward, as I tried to register my phone in a country where roaming was not available. If the phone is registered in a country where roaming is available this is not a problem.