after a refresher course on port speed negotiation, the phone is
working again for inbound and outbound calls via our google voice
number: (513) 593-9292.
i should probably remind you that the telephone at the space WILL NOT
work for 911 emergency calls.
if you have an emergency please use your mobile phone.
not even google knows what will happen if you dial 911 from google
voice:
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=3cb964a90227d06a&hl=en
I’m going to have to pick your brain about what was entailed in this. Did you have to get IP phone service independently of google voice?
-Dave B.
google voice is a strange beast. it's not meant to be a stand alone
VOIP service like vonage. it's more like a "one ring to rule them
all" approach to all of the existing phone numbers in your life. it
offers a free phone number and free inbound and outbound calls to
landlines and mobiles (the PSTN) but it does so with a bunch of
caveats. i think the caveats are there to help google's relationships
with mobile carriers.
those caveats are:
1) you need at least 1 working phone number to register. most people
use their mobiles.
2) if your working phone number goes away, so does your GV number
3) you don't get SIP credentials for your GV account, so adding it to
your IP phone or ATA isn't a simple proposition
4) technically, you can't make outbound calls thru GV without setting
the call up through the GV website first.
caveat 1 is easy to get around. sipgate and ipkall will give you a
free west coast number and unlimited incoming calls. outgoing calls
are another story.
caveat 2 is easy to get around if you are registering your mobile,
don't get rid of your mobile and it's all good. if you are using
caveat sipgate or ipkall, make sure you use your numbers on a monthly
basis so they don't go away. we originally mapped our GV number to
our bell landline when we had DSL, and when we terminated service with
cincinnati bell that number went away and took our original google
voice number with it. funny story, GV was out of cincinnati metro
numbers, and so we ended up with an oxford number that is a toll call
from cincinnati 
caveat 3 can be circumvented with ipkall or sipgate. ipkall's number
maps to any SIP URI and free sip accounts are super easy to find.
sipgate will give you SIP credentials for your new number. with your
SIP credentials you can set up your IP phone or ATA and get incoming
calls on your phone no problem.
caveat 4 is the big source of drama for using GV. it seems like
google changes things around every few months and breaks the hacks
that people do to get around setting up your calls using the google
voice website. originally we did this with service called gizmo,
which google acquired and shut down for good in march. some folks
have had limited success with asterisk, but for our application (1
trunk and 1 extension) asterisk is totally overkill.
eventually i would like to use asterisk for some really advanced
stuff, like conference bridges and the like, but my PBX kung fu just
isn't that strong at the moment.
fortunately, i found this neat little box that does some web magic to
handle a lot of the google voice stuff for outbound calls:
http://nerdvittles.com/?p=720
hopefully it will solve the GV problem for good, or maybe google will
finally just give us SIP credentials the way god intended it.
Amen! And on the 8th day god said let them speak SIP!
Thanks for the rundown. Ill probably nag you more about this again. I want to play more with Asterisk too.
-DB
i also updated the phone wiki page. it's pretty sad that it's
basically two years of stopgap solutions 
i too want to dig into asterisk some more, but as a client/server guy,
the telco stuff associated with a PBX makes my head hurt.
I had to manage the telco stuff in my former life. That side of things I can handle.
-DB