[hales]

All of the linked XMPP-phonenetwork bridging services appear to be United States + Canada only, so I have no hope of trying or testing this software.

The best I have in my country (Australia) are SIP providers. They generally only offer landline numbers; I think some might offer mobile numbers but I have not tried those services (they cost more and I suspect texting won't work anyway).

Nonetheless some simple self-hosted SIP-XMPP bridge software would be amazing. We'd also need XMPP clients that understand this, however, otherwise using existing tel://xxx address books would be fiddly (you would have to manually retype them to be an XMPP address).

N.B. SIP clients on phones seem to be a bit slow and unreliable. I use one daily nonetheless, along with Snikket (conversations), which also has its fair share of issues on different people's phones.

[jeroenhd]

I haven't tried it myself (I don't even run an XMPP server anymore) but based on the description, combining something like sylkserver[1], perhaps with a dedicated SIP service (Asterisk/FreePBX?), should get you VoIP phone calls from XMPP. You can probably get one of those SIM-to-SIP devices (or maybe there's software) if you want mobile phone calls.

There's one problem with this setup: emergency numbers may not work and might get routed to the wrong place.

[1]: https://github.com/AGProjects/sylkserver

[prmoustache]

There is another major problem which is latency. I hate it when someone decides to call me using whatsapp by convenience (the phone/call button is easy to reach right on top of the message view) because latency is way too high which means people keep speaking at the same time unless you use it like a walkie-talkie and say "over" when you clean the line.

I know the latency is already a thing with regular wireless phone network and we will probably never get back to analog wired level but it is still much lower than the latency the instant messaging apps call have, which is just too much to be bearable for anything else but the very occasional call.

[bryant]

> which is just too much to be bearable for anything else but the very occasional call.

I've compensated for this in IM calls by speaking with a more deliberate and measured cadence as well as adding slightly longer pauses (and waiting for such) at transitions in conversation. At least for me, it's worked just fine.

I have plenty of friends on the opposite side of the planet who I can carry a conversation with despite the latency by following this.

[singpolyma3]

https://blog.jmp.chat/b/mobile-friendly-sip-gateway