Two Malawian colleagues recently told me that the guidelines for configuring softphones for ComFi PC-to-phone service were not user friendly and I agree with them 100%. The folks at ComFi are giving us good rates and even good discounts for the their services but their guidelines for softphone configuration are really bad. They must do something before it’s too late. I am sure many people interested in their PC-to-Phone service are let down by these kinds of things. In my case, I spent several hours trying to configure my softphone. I could not do otherwise because I was so desperate. Thank God, I finally managed to configure the ComFi’s recommended softphone, SJ Labs as well as Xlite.  I have so far remained with the Xlite softphone because, in my view, it is better than the former.By the way these softphones are free.The good thing is that the ComFi’s PC-to-Phone account can work with any SIP Softphone and SIP Equipment or Hardware. The purpose of this post is to share information on how to configure an Xlite softphone so that it must work with the ComFi PC-to-Phone account. I did it for my Malawian friends and I felt like spreading it out to the rest of you guys.

Let me take you through the configuration process for Xlite3.0 softphone.Assuming that you have the following ComFi PC-to-Phone parameters:Username, Password and SIP Server IP address. If you don’t have these parameters, then the first thing you need to do is to create PC-to-phone/VoIP Account at ComFi . The steps that you must follow are as follows:

1. Download Xlite and install it on your PC.This works fine for Windows but if you need other Xlite versions for MAC and Linux, you can get them from the Xlite site. I have not yet tested them but I am sure the principle would just be the same.
2. Launch your Xlite softphone soon after installing it.
3. Drag your cursor to the center of your softphone and right click it.


4. In the emerging menu, click SIP Account settings.
5. Then click Properties.
6. Type your preferred Display Name in the Display Name field.It can be any name.
7. Type your ComFi user name in the User name and the Authorized user name fields.
8. Type your SIP server IP address in the Domain Name field.
9. Under the Domain Proxy, Check the box that appears before the Register with domain and receive incoming calls.
10. Choose to send outbound via domain.
11. From this point the softphone will try to connect to the SIP server to get registered.Once that is done, you can start phoning your buddies all over the world.
12. When dialing out, make sure that you prefix the number that you want to call with 011. For example, if you want to call 265XXXXXXX, you must dial 011265XXXXXXX.

NOTE: You must actually TYPE the characters in.Otherwise if you do COPY and PASTE, it will not work. This trick was discovered by my Cuban friend, Ricardo Sotolongo.

Wishing you all the best. My advice is that you must have a number of Internet phone accounts so that you always have something to fall back on in case there are connectivity problems with your favorite phone.

Related posts:

1. Two PC-to-phone VoIP services that are cheaper than Skype
2. Vopium, a mobile VoIP Startup from Copenhagen