Nextcloud Talk is an app that allows video/audio/text conversations with other people connected to your Nextcloud instance or to people connected to other federated Nextcloud instances. Unfortunately, due to its peer-to-peer traffic in video conferences, it can be used reliably only with about 5 conference participants. If you want more participants you are expected to install the HPB (High Performance Backend) which is developed by a third party (Struktur AG), includes a Signaling Server and a Selective Forwarding Unit (SFU) component that solves the bottleneck created by the peer-to-peer architecture by receiving a stream from each user and forwarding it to all participants. HPB has been āopen-sourcedā but doesnāt come with detailed documentation on how to install it and, more importantly, it doesnāt offer the SIP dial-in and dial-out functionality without a SIP bridge that was created by the same company and is a proprietary, non-free program.
So, if you want to have only one-to-one video/audio/text conversations, Nextcloud Talk can handle them well. If you want to have video conferences, Talk still handles them well until you reach about 5 participants in a conference. For video conferences with more than 5 participants in regular circumstances (without special hardware and high-speed network connections) you will have to follow the cumbersome process of installing the HPB. And if you want to be able to call real phone numbers from inside Talk, or to have people call from their mobile phone to a conference roomās phone number and participate in a conference (the SIP ādial-outā and ādial-inā functionality), you will have to install the proprietary SIP bridge offered by Struktur AG, which, being proprietary, goes against the principles on which Nextcloud was founded and that motivated hundreds of developers to contribute to the project. As you probably know, āproprietary softwareā is the opposite of āfree and open sourceā software. The two are based on opposing principles, so, they are irreconciliable.
On the other hand, if you just want to add the SIP calling functionality to Nextcloud, in the sense of being able to make audio phone calls from inside Nextcloud to regular phones and the other way around, you can install a Nextcloud application like SIP Trip Phone, which is basically a SIP client in the form of a browser phone. To make real calls to real phone numbers with SIP Trip Phone you will obviously need to own a phone number acquired from a SIP provider like Telnyx, Localphone, Flowroute, Twilio, Vonage, etc. You can use any SIP provider you like but only very few of them allow direct connections from web applications that use SIP over WebSocket, like SIP Trip Phone. So, if you want to connect SIP Trip Phone directly to the SIP provider, only a few will allow it. For example, from the 5 providers mentioned above, only Telnyx allows it. This is why, the standard way of using SIP Trip Phone is to install Asterisk on your own server as explained in this guide, connect it to your SIP provider and then connect SIP Trip Phone to your Asterisk server. All respectable SIP providers allow their customers to connect their Asterisk servers to their account. In addition, with Asterisk you can add advanced PBX features to your calls, like IVR (Interactive Voice Response or āvoice menuā), voicemail, queue management, music on hold, number blacklisting, call recording, audio conference calls, etc.
Of course, this implies that you have the time and patience to closely follow the instructions in the above mentioned Install Asterisk guide and in the Install SIP Trip Phone chapter.
SIP trip phone is a āVOIP clientā running inside of Nextcloud (which makes more or less no sense in my eyes.. but who knows)
Voice over IP (VoIP) phones are of 3 types:
- hardphones (harware phones that look exactly like regular phones but they are connected with UTP cables and RJ45 jacks to routers or adapters and use VoIP protocols to make and receive calls over the Internet)
- softphones (software phones that act like hardphones, but you have to install them on your desktop/laptop/mobile before using them; a good example is the above mentioned Linphone)
- browser phones (softphones that load in a browser, like any web page; their advantage is that you donāt have to install them on your device, since any device comes with a browser and you only need a browser to access them)
So, unlike a regular softphone that you have to install first on all the devices that you will be using, like your desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile phone, etc., SIP Trip Phone is a SIP client that you install once inside Nextcloud, then access it from anywhere in the world, with any device connected to the Internet. Even if it depends on Nextcloud and has no connection to Talk, the advantages offered by SIP Trip Phone are obvious.
VoIP phone calls are up to 70% cheaper than regular phone calls and international VoIP phone calls can cost even 90% less than regular phone calls. If you have a business with lots of phone calls this can add up each month. With SIP Trip Phone, Asterisk and a Telnyx number you can make calls within the US starting from $0.0050 per minute and receive calls with $0.0075 per minute or less and with a Localphone number you can make calls with $0.0060 per minute and receive calls with $0 per minute.
I forgot to mention: if you use Asterisk, all phone calls between extensions configured on your Asterisk server are free of charge. Also, since version 1.1.5, SIP Trip Phone has an integration with the Contacts app, in the sense that it lists all the contacts with voice-capable numbers and all the Nextcloud users with phone numbers that were not set up as private. In this way you can search through your contacts by name or role and you can call them with one click.