Picking a SIP provider

A SIP provider (sometimes called a “SIP trunk provider” or “ITSP”) is the company that hands out phone numbers and routes calls between your softphone and the rest of the phone network. WaveKat Voice connects to one or more of these — it doesn’t replace the provider, it just gives you a desktop app to use the account.

If you don’t have a provider yet, this page is what to look for. If you do and it isn’t in WaveKat Voice’s dropdown, this page explains the fields you’ll need to fill in yourself.

What to look for in a provider

Most home and small-office users pick on three things:

• Coverage. Does the provider serve your country, give out numbers in the area codes you want, and let you call the places you call most? Domestic-only providers (e.g. 2talk in NZ, sipgate in Germany) are usually cheapest if you’re staying local; global providers (Twilio, Telnyx) cost more per minute but let you mix and match regions.
• Pricing model. Pay-as-you-go (per-minute) vs. flat-rate subscriptions. Per-minute is cheaper for light use; flat-rate beats it past a few hundred minutes a month.
• SIP friendliness. Some providers are SIP-native and hand out registrar / username / password the moment you sign up. Others (carriers selling consumer “VoIP” plans) lock SIP behind a support ticket or don’t expose it at all. WaveKat Voice needs SIP — pick a provider that advertises “SIP trunking” or “BYO device” support.

Don’t have a provider yet?

Check what you already have first:

• A FRITZ!Box router — common in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It can let WaveKat Voice use the phone line you already have, with no new provider. See the FRITZ!Box page.
• An internet phone line from your current provider — many sell one, but not all of them hand out SIP details. Ask them for “SIP credentials for a softphone”.

Otherwise, these providers hand out SIP details the moment you sign up, and most let you try before paying:

Providers we have ready-to-go presets for

The dropdown in WaveKat Voice’s new-account form fills in the technical details for these providers, and each has a step-by-step setup guide:

• sipgate — Germany.
• easybell — Germany.
• FRITZ!Box — your own router, Germany / Austria / Switzerland.
• OVHcloud — France.
• VoIP.ms — US / Canada.
• Zadarma — global.
• Telnyx — global.
• Twilio — global.
• 2talk — New Zealand / Australia.
• HeroNZ — New Zealand.

These are SIP providers we’ve shipped presets for; the list is not a recommendation or an endorsement. Your own provider may be a better fit for your use case.

Using a provider that isn’t in the dropdown

Pick Enter details manually at the right of the Provider field. You’ll need four things from your provider:

The Advanced section of the form covers the long tail of fields most providers don’t need:

• Login name — only if your provider uses a different login name than your username. Most providers don’t.
• Server — only if your provider gave you a separate registrar address from the domain. Most providers use the same value for both.
• Port — almost always 5060, or 5061 for TLS.
• Connection — UDP by default, which is what most providers want. Use TCP only if your provider explicitly asks for it. It is not a setting to experiment with: if your router closes a TCP connection, the line stays signed out until you sign it in again.
  • TLS encrypts your sign-in and the details of each call on their way to your provider, if your provider supports it — check their documentation for the port, usually 5061. The call’s audio itself is not encrypted. The app checks that the provider’s security certificate matches your account’s domain, and won’t connect if it doesn’t.
• Refresh sign-in — how often, in seconds, the app re-registers with your provider. 600 (ten minutes) is the default and works for most providers. Some providers want a different value; the per-provider guides call out the right number.
• Keep-alive — in seconds; leave blank unless your provider tells you a value.

Common failure modes

• “Password rejected” (HTTP 401): double-check the password — providers usually have a separate “SIP password” distinct from your account login. Some providers also use a different “login name” (auth username) than the SIP username; check the Advanced section.
• “Couldn’t reach your provider’s server”: the domain you typed didn’t resolve, or your provider’s registrar is down. Check the domain spelling first — twilio.com and sip.twilio.com are different hosts, for example.
• No incoming calls but outgoing works: your provider isn’t routing inbound calls to this registration. Some providers require explicit DID-to-trunk mapping in their dashboard; check your provider’s docs.

If a provider you’d like to see added isn’t in the list, drop us a line at [email protected].