Use your italkbb on your own soft phone client

I believe a lot of people heard about italkbb – this is an aggressive Chinese Telecommunication company that trying to promote their cheap VoIP service here in Australia.

VoIP is not something new in Australia. I set up a VoIP platform for an ISP in Australia back in 2007. It is an open standard I have used Pennytel, Exetel, and other overseas VoIP companies.

Most of the VoIP providers in Australia give you a freedom to use your own ATA, softphone or even a mobile App so you can enjoy cheap phone call all the times. However, italkbb is operating in a different way, they provide you a Linksys ATA and it is like fully plug and play (provided your home router provides DHCP).

You don’t have access to your sip account details (where you can use those details to other ATA / Softphone). I have seen a lot of people talking about wanting to use italkbb on other ATA/soft phone, but due to their customer services/technical support personal won’t give you any hints on the SIP settings, it makes you impossible to use italkbb service on other software/hardware at all.

I am going to provide you a guide on how your can obtains your account detail. Tools that you need
1. a switch that can setup a SPAN port (aka mirror port)
2. a computer with Wireshark installed
3. italkbb Linksys ATA
4. a working internet connection

First of all, you have to setup a SPAN port to monitor the traffic going in and out of the Linksys ATA, where the SPAN port is connected to the computer that running wireshark to capture the traffic. If you have a cisco switch, the command to setup a span port as follow (Linksys ATA on Port 6 and Wireshark on Port 7).

monitor session 1 source interface Fa6
monitor session 1 destination interface Fa7

as soon as you power on the Linksys ATA, the Linksys ATA will try to get a configuration profile from the italkbb server, that file contains all the information you need to use your italkbb service on other ATA/Softphone.

You can check your Wireshark output after your Linksys ATA status light comes on. What you can see in Wireshark is some DNS requests and one http request.

The DNS requests are for resolving the sip proxy ip address and the http configuration file ip address. italkbb has it private dns server, as a result, even you get the setting from the configuration file, the sip proxy server and the web server (for the configuration) is not directly accessible from your computer or internet.

In the wireshark, you should able to see the http respond packets. If you look at the packets (in Ascii view), the http respond from the server provides you all the information you need. It looks like a XML file with the following information :


<Display_Name>Your Name</Display_Name>
<User_id>XXXXXXXXXXXX</User_id> (your italkbb number which is the label on the Linksys ATA)
<Password>xxxxxxxxx</Password> (your sip password, which you can use it on other ata device)
<Auth_id>XXXXXXXXXXXX</Auth_id>
<Proxy>p7glm22.italkbb.com</Proxy> (this is the proxy server I got)
<Outbound_Proxy>p7glm22.italkbb.com</Outbound_Proxy> (same as above)
<SIP_PORT>10000</SIP_PORT>
<Profile_rule>http://cfp7glm22.italkbb.com:80/customContent/GenX.dbml?MA=000eXXXXXXXXX&SWVER=5.2.13(004)&PSN=2102</Profile_rule>(this is the URL to get your configuration from italkbb, if you have your mac address you can request for the configuration file, luckily italkbb web server cannot be resolved via public DNS, but still I think this is not secure enough)
<Web_Server_Port>1980</Web_Server_Port> (This is for you to access your Linksys ATA, use http://ataip:1980)
<Admin_Password>46394552</Admin_Password> (this is the password for admin)
<User_Password>1234</User_Password> (this is the password for user)


I am able to take my account details and set it up on my iphone using the app called Bria to make outgoing call. Please note that italkbb use port 10000 instead of 5060. I have changed the Proxy Server to ip address in order to get it to work. The server you get from the configuration cannot be publicly resolved. If you are using softphone on Linux, Mac and windows, you can manually edit the host file to make it works. Otherwise, you can directly enter the ip address. However, it will not register for incoming call.

I can now make use of italkbb in anywhere as long as I have good mobile reception. If you are on Telstra, it is a very good way to make international phone call without paying too much for Telstra.

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