Ekiga.net and Android... mobile VoIP without tears!?

Now that Skype has fallen into the hands of Microsoft, I am exploring the VoIP market for more open and free video-chat solutions.  Without doubt, the alternative is SIP.  If you support the Open Source philosophy, you quickly end up finding Ekiga a good SIP-client because it is free and works for both Linux and Windows.  Consequently, you create yourself an Ekiga.net account.  I have such an account, and now I want to start using it with my Google Samsung Nexus S smartphone, running Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread.  My most important goals are:

• being able to make SIP video-calls
• doing this from behind my wireless router or NAT
• being reachable at my ekiga.net SIP-address

Getting things up and running seems not so easy, especially because I do not only want voice, but also video.  Within this post, I will try to summarize my findings concerning Ekiga.net and Android-based smartphones.

Interesting to know is that most of the times, I'm behind a wireless router with all the NAT-trouble that comes with it.  So quite frequently, when my Nexus S connects over WiFi to the Internet, it has a local IP-address within the 192.168.1.X range.  For SIP, this often seems to be the bottleneck...

Android 2.3.4 native SIP-client
If you are behind NAT, then with this client you will not be able to register and get a `606 Not Acceptable' answer from the ekiga.net server. This problem is also nicely described at http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#ekiga.net

As long as Android's native SIP-client does not support some kind of NAT-traversal technology like STUN, ICE,... you will not be able to register.  See also the feature request at http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=15685

Sipdroid 2.2 beta
Registering with Sipdroid works just fine.  However, to traverse the NAT, you must enable the use of a STUN Server under the Advanced Options.  The name of the STUN server is stun.ekiga.net and the STUN Server port is 3478.

I have been able to make voice-calls with this client, but no video-calls.  If anybody knows how to do it, please let me know!

CSipSimple
With this client it is currently not possible to make video calls, but support seems to be on the way, see http://code.google.com/p/csipsimple/issues/detail?id=112&q=video

Jitsi
This client has no port to Android yet, but according to http://www.jitsi.org/index.php/Documentation/FAQ#android this is planned for 2011 or 2012.