How-to setup SIP accounts in X-Lite or other SIP phone [Tutorial]

Firstly, a very Happy New Year to all you wonderful readers!! Hope the new year brings all the good things that you have always dreamt of…

Now on to today’s topic. In some of my earlier posts, I have casually talked about using soft phones (SIP software clients) to access VoIP. However, it seems that setting up SIP account deserves a detailed post. So, today I have a detailed post about setting up SIP accounts in a softphone. I am using X-lite for this tutorial, but you can easily follow the guide for any other softphone or even an ATA. You can download x-lite here (the latest version works on Windows 7).

First time you start x-lite, you will see the following screen:

To setup your SIP account in x-lite, just right click anywhere on the x-lite window and select “SIP Account Settings…” and you will be presented with:

In the free version, you can only add 1 SIP account. To add more accounts, you may want to consider other versions (e.g., Bria or eyeBeam). Just click “Add” in the above screen and enter the details of your SIP account. You can find the SIP settings of Betamax providers (e.g., ActionVoIP, SmartVoIP, Jumblo) here. Remember, you can always get a free SIP account from your Voxalot account. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will use Voxalot. So just enter the SIP details of Voxalot:

The display name can be anything that you want to displayed on the caller ID of the other party. However, in my experience it does not usually work very well. User name and the Authorization user name are the username of your account. Enter the password in the Password field. For most VoIP provider, the incoming and outgoing servers are the same. For example, if you want to use Rynga.com SIP settings, just enter the SIP server (sip.rynga.com) in Domain and select Outbound via domain. However in case of Voxalot, you need to enter separate Domains and proxy server address as shown above.

Although STUN servers are optional for most providers, if you have the STUN server details and you want to enter it, just click the Topology tab and enter the details in the STUN server field.

If you are technically inclined, I would recommend you to look around the other options (although you are not required to – the default settings work just as fine). Just click OK and Close in the next screen and you should be back to the main x-lite window. x-lite should now try to register with your SIP provider and if all goes well, you should see “Ready” status:

Thats it!! You are now ready to make calls using your SIP account. Here is a detailed video tutorial explaining how to set up a few SIP account on x-lite.

Please note that you can follow the same instructions for other clients as well. Most SIP client use the same terminologies for these fields. As always, if you have any questions about any step or if you are not able to get this running, feel free to drop a line and I will try my best to assist you…

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2. How to configure custom SIP accounts and Skype in Fring on Nokia Symbian platform [Tutorial]
3. How to add custom SIP accounts & configure Skype in Fring [Tutorial]
4. Use Whistle Phone on any SIP device – Make free VoIP calls to USA [Tutorial]
5. How-to Enable SIP Support with Google Voice [Tutorial]