Wengophone: VoIP done right

Dreaming about a free software competitor for Skype? Maybe your wait is over

Marco Marongiu
2006-06-16
Published on web | Easy
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A new, full-featured free software application pops its head into the VoIP world, and it nominates itself as the most serious competitor of Skype. Its name is Wengophone.

What is Wengophone?

: Figure 1: Wengophone “NG” 2.0 beta running on a Debian testing

In short: Wengophone is a communication-over-IP application. With Wengophone you can:

place voice calls to other Wengophone users
create audio conferences with up to three users
place video calls to other Wengophone users
exchange instant messages with other Wengophone users, or MSN, Yahoo, AIM/ICQ, Jabber and GoogleTalk users;

And this all comes for free. If you also buy credits from Wengo, a French Voice-over-IP service provider that backs the development of Wengophone, you can also:

place phone calls to land lines at very low rates;
place phone calls to mobile phones as well, for rates that are still too high for national calls, but very good for internationals;
send SMS messages everywhere for 8.5 cents Euro (plus VAT where applicable)

Wengophone is a communication-over-IP application

This may sound a little like “deja-vue”, so let’s take a closer look at Wengophone and make a comparison with its most famous competitor: Skype.

Wengophone vs Skype

It was the beginning of 2005 when I discovered Skype; I liked it because it worked and it was multi-platform. Well, it was proprietary software, but there was nothing like Skype in the free software world.

: Figure 2: Skype running on GNU/Linux

All in all, I was happy with Skype, even if the GNU/Linux client had some “quirks” that made it less functional than I had liked, and needed some tricks to fix (as an exercise, look up “skype_dsp_hijacker” in Google). But, after some months, things began to get frustrating: Skype was acquired by eBay, they were pushing a lot of effort in the Windows version that quickly reached version 2.0 and 2.5beta, while the GNU/Linux version was stuck at the 1.2.0.18 released in October 2005. Skype didn’t show any release plans for a newer GNU/Linux version, no new features were in sight but, above all, no bugfixes were happening.

Some days ago, while I was googling around trying to find if there was any news about a new GNU/Linux release of Skype, I stumbled on the name “Wengo”. I never heard about Wengo before, so I pointed my Google searching toward it, and I got a surprise.

I discovered that Wengo is a French Voice-over-IP company that develops an Internet phone using the standard SIP protocol; they had a so-named “Classic” client for Windows, MacOS and Linux (in DEB and RPM packages!), and were developing a new, full-featured client.

I am all for standards, so that all sounded interesting and I kept reading, going from one surprise to another. I saw that fares were really cheap (actually cheaper than Skype’s); that Wengophone supported SMS messages as well as phone and video calls, and (oh, my!) it was compatible with a load of instant messaging systems! And when it turned out that the Wengophone was developed as a free-software project, I nearly fell out of my chair!

That was all very good to read, and I really wanted to test it. Luckily, they run an “Introductory offer” for new subscribers: when you subscribe you get an unlimited number of two-minute land-line calls for two months for free. So I downloaded and installed the 2.0beta client and placed a call, and discovered that the audio quality was very, very good. I was sold!

This is the story so far. Now I’ll try to do a feature comparison between Wengophone and Skype for GNU/Linux and review all points one by one. I’ll assign +1 (good) or +2 (distinct advantage) points to each competitor for each “yes” in the table.

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Copyright information

This article is made available under the "Attribution-NonCommercial" Creative Commons License 3.0 available from http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/.

Biography

Marco Marongiu: Born in 1971, Marongiu graduated in applied mathematics in 1997; he's now a full-time system administrator for a European ISP. He's also a Perl programmer and technical writer and lecturer by passion, and is interested in web and XML related technologies. Marongiu has been a Debian User since version 1.1.10 and he helped found the GULCh Linux Users Group (Gruppo Utenti Linux Cagliari), the first one in Sardinia. He recently became a father to his first son Andrea, and he's been trying to reorganise his life since, so that he can start writing technical articles again and holding seminars.

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Interesting article, but the version of Skype that I am using does support SMS messages and video calls.
I think that puts Skype in the lead!
(Also, I do not understand why you do not regard Skype as free. I have not paid anything for the software.)

Hi John,

First of all Marco is talking about the GNU/Linux version of Skype which is still in version 1.2.0.18. He makes this clear in the article:

"Skype was acquired by eBay, they were pushing a lot of effort in the Windows version that quickly reached version 2.0 and 2.5beta, while the GNU/Linux version was stuck at the 1.2.0.18 released in October 2005. Skype didnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t show any release plans for a newer GNU/Linux version, no new features were in sight but, above all, no bugfixes were happening."

"Now IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ll try to do a feature comparison between Wengophone and Skype for GNU/Linux and review all points one by one. IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢ll assign +1 (good) or +2 (distinct advantage) points to each competitor for each Ã¢â‚¬Å“yesÃ¢â‚¬? in the table."

The version you are using is for MS Windows. We choose not to use that OS here because it is not free software.

Which brings me to your question about Skype not being free: "free software", which this magazine is named after, does not mean software that has no cost. It means software that conforms to the criteria laid out by the Free Software Foundation. To sum up for you (in case you don't want to go to their site):

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software.

I encourage you to read more of our articles here at FSM; we have a lot of articles that answer your question in more depth.

Happy reading!

-Dave

johnmoffat,
I am trying to run wengophone 2.0 not from terminal as described in Free Software Magazine.
The article was great and easy. But, do I have to run wengophone from terminal all the time?
Please help me.
Thanks
sramires

At least not from a privacy point of view. Nor is the lack of support for encryption.
In fact, from browsing quickly through the article, there was no mentioning of encryption *at all*, which I find a bit disappointing.

Is there any progress on zfone?

Otherwise, thank you for the article. I'll certainly try out wengophone.

Dag B

Hello Dag

While I don't agree about the centralized contact list (I keep my opinion: it's a fundamental thing, and not having it is an headache), you got a point with the encryption thing. Yes, encryption is another +1 (at least) for Skype. I don't know about zfone, but maybe someone at Openwengo will pop up here and satisfy your curiosity :-)

Thanks for the compliments.

Ciao
--Marco

...if it somehow was stored as an encrypted object on the server, and only decryptable by the owner.
Hope the wengo guys read these comments. :-)

Dag B.

That's definitely an interesting concern. We're going to think about it in the near future. Many thanks for your insightful input!

Best regards.

Hello,

Just check out this article on OpenWengo's blog: http://blog.openwengo.org/index.php?/archives/55-Everbee-and-OpenWengo-partnership-to-achieve-open-source-VoIP-security.html .

There is no progress regarding zrtp yet, but it might change soon. Stay tuned on blog.openwengo.org for more information!

Best regards.

Hi Marco,

I think this was a good article. But you missed a critical point: Firewall traversal. As much as I like SIP,
it is notorious for NAT / firewall issues. For example I was recently in a network where ALL outbound tcp and udp connections where blocked. In fact the only way out was through a SQUID web proxy. I'm curious to see how openwengo performs in an environment like this. Skype WAS able to traverse through this environment. It looks like openwengo has some support for this kind of thing. But, how well does it work?

Secondly, lets look at the easiest solution. A home network with a cheap NAT router. In this environment using sip, how does the Wengophone send and receive RTP packets? In most environments it is forced to be relayed through an RTP relay server. Solutions like STUN, TURN, etc, only work so well, in most cases in my experience the RTP has to be hairpinned through a remote server. This has some severe scaling issues. How does openwengo perform here?

Andy
http://www.thevoipblog.org

From a free software perspective, i think the major point about Skype is not being not free software,
but being a closed service based on proprietary protocols.

The whole Internet Telephony business is organized around closed islands. Either with proprietary protocols
or with SIP, but very few VoIP providers play the open game.

This doesn't make sense, because stricly speaking the actual service is not provided by the telephony provider (Skype, Wengo, or whatever) but by the internet connection itself. The provider just put you in contact.
SIP is an open protocol that can work in an open environment, like the Web, where multiple Internet/PSNT gateway service provider can compete against the same user base.

Instead, each SIP VoIP provider (Woize, Wengo, Abbeynet, Free etc) try to keep the user base closed by providing closed client software, even if it use open protocols. The important point of OpenWengo may be having a role in opening this situation, but being financed by one of the player, i am skeptical.

Unless the small players understand they have to open up and interoperate, the proprietary big player, Skype, will build a planetary monopoly that will us European ask to go back to national monopolies :-< ..

Maurizio

The main drawbacks of the article (like encryption) have benn noted already. What I would like to hear your opinion about is another free/open source VoIP application, called Gizmo. What are the kex differences, advantages, disadvantages, etc. www.gizmoproject.com/

I know that it uses the SIP protocol too, it is already connected with GoogleTalk given that both use some very similar protocols (so it was easy). This connection does not mean that google talk is simply integrated, but you need to have a google talk account too. No, this is a true interconnection! (You can have a conference with 2 friends, 1 useing gizmo the other googletalk. Can you achieve this with wengophone's MSN support for example?

Any other ideas?

Hmmmm... if it was, I could download the source code somewhere. But after some searching in the site I can't find any. So is it free just as a free beer?

Ciao!
--Marco

Um, okay you all have made this very fuzzy for me...

Which systems are free-licensed software?

Which are using open/free standards

I'm confused about this -- and on the FSM website, I don't feel I should be. This is one place I'd expect to keep these things really clear!

As far as I can tell, gizmo and openwengo both use the open SIP standard. gizmo, however, is closed source software (just as Skype is), while openwengo is free software. Skype is both closed source and using a proprietary (i.e. non-standard) protocol.

Thanks for the article!

I was initially pleased that Skype had Linux support but saw as you mentioned that once eBay bought it out they let the Linux version lag way behind the Window$ version. Not good!

The other thing that cheesed me off was reading about Skype's deal with Intel where they "cripple" the number of users you can have in a conference call if you use a non-Intel processor. Crippling hardware is pure corporate evil in my books. All of my machines run AMD processors...guess I always like the "underdog"... and have always felt that AMD gave you a bigger CPU bang for your buck...pound, euro, yen whatever ;)

Right now Skype has a "deal" in Canada and the U.S. that runs till the end of the year where they let you "Skype-out" to the phone system for free. I'm hoping that by the time the "deals" end Wengophone will be a little further along towards being stable and I along with my friends will make the "switch".

For a comparison of the Skype and Wengo - out rates (to regular landlines)
http://www.voipproducts.eu

There is another third party site called voipreview.org that lists many voip providers, most of which are unfortunately not free but many provide more secure features than wengo.

Jerry Huyghe
SageCom

I use wengo for calls to landlines.

I prefer Wengo and look forward to encryption. Interoperability is what is most required. Wengo is more likely to acheive it. This is clear from their philosophy and decision to go with . CoIpManager as a better IMWrapper in the future. See http://blog.openwengo.org/index.php

A lot of people would like to use WengoPhone with other SIP providers.
CoIpManager will provide this feature since everything (MSN, AIM, Yahoo, Wengo, GoogleTalk, FreeWorlDialup...) will be the same for WengoPhone GUI. This is CoIpManager main purpose anyway.

Last time I checked wengophone, I dismissed it temporarily (till the 2.0 release, I hope) because the client was only tied to the wengo company.

What I'm looking for is kinda general purpose SIP client so that you only need to change your settings if you want to call with another SIP network provider and that's it.

By the way, I refer you to STUN for a few things on the firewall traversal side.
________________________
Let's go party.

about encryption: this could be interesting: according to it OPENWENGO DOES HAVE ENCRYPTION NOW!?

The only thing I care about really is that Wengo is free (as in freedom obviously), and uses a free and open protocol, whereas Skype doesn't. That's why I don't use Skype. I use exclusively free software almost all of the time now, with Kubuntu. I'm having trouble installing Wengo on GNU/Linux at the moment because I use the amd64 version, but I have tried the proper 2.0 release under MS Windows and it is very nice.

I once read that skype worked as "a super node on the local PC", hence why it is ressource hungry, so you bring cpu ressource to the skype network. (If I understood correctly) Is this true?

AFAIK openwango does not do that

Looking to move from skype to openwango when
my credits have run out

Ciao Marco!
I want to thank you and congratulate for article.
I followed and could install the Wengophone without a problem.
I'm running away from Skype as the communications and services get worst.
I also had problem with Gizmo.
I believe that Wengophone could succeed, as they had the same structure as Mozilla.
An open source community (www.openwengo.org) and the corporate one (wengophone).
I still could not connect to aim, googletalk, neither could the phone call....but
I know I will be soon sorted out, there more people trying to help people (Linux user in fact) than in Skype.

talueguito
raul

Ciao Marco!
I hope you don't mind I posted your article in the wengophone forum.
I find your article very useful.
I've made to small changes in your method. I installed in /usr/local/
and instead of making a new script, I linked the shell script that came with the ditribution
( ln -s /usr/local/Wengophone/wengophone.sh /usr/local/bin/wengophone)

thanks Marco

talueguito
raul

I am definitely not afraid you post my article somewhere else (as long as its license is not infringed, of course :-) Could you please provide a link to the forum?

About the /usr/local/packagename choice, I am definitely against that approach and that's why I choose a /opt/packagename-version instead, and use stow to report everything to /usr/local. But that's a subject for another article or blog post.

Cheers!
--bronto

Just tried Wengo on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, where it is included in the repositories, making installation trivial.

First impressions are very positive: Easy signup, UI -way- better looking than Skype, Integrated support for most (if not all) protocols supported by Gaim.

However, no luck actually using the thing yet. Since it's been trying to 'connect' for over half an hour now. That in spite of the fact that I used Wengo itself to setup my account, and despite the fact that I'm actively using Skype and Gaim at the same time, which obviously have no trouble connecting. Now maybe it's a bug in the ubuntu package (feisty fawn is still in beta for the next two months), but sure would have been a lot more impressive if it had worked out of the box. Will try it again in a month or after Feisty is released. Installed version is 2.0rev8108.

Ciao!

Can you try to start it without having skype and gaim on? Maybe it's just they can't stand one another :-)

Seriously now, try it without too many programs contending resources and let me know if it works!

Ciao and thanks
--bronto

Well Mandy must be getting a back hander to push Wengophone so hard,default install and entry on toolbar in FF.
Wish they hadn't,wasted 2 hours trying to get it configured. And then when I finally got it working it crashed on every call, would only crash even when not making a call and would not work with my c-media card or my creative card (Aud2).
No-one I know with K/Ubuntu has it working,and I have a couple of buddies using Mandriva Spring,neither can make even a pc to pc call without it crashing,one has no sound,the other no video and sound very poor even with an 8mb broadband connection.
Best thing about it is the ui....oh and uninstalling the rubbish and using Twinkle,or Ekiga (when ekiga.net is up and running that is)

The Wengophone furbished with Feisty Fawn Final doesn't function: impossible to make calls or send sms. Downloaded 2.1 RC2, well now i can send sms (german, spanish or french accents do not work), but still impossible to cake phone calls :(
Let's hope it will work with 2.1 RC3!

I need voip mainly for GTalk, but I've heard Wengophone is not the best for it...

Wengo is a free software, so what? The quality of the calls are not that great. I consider Raketu the best in calling and plus now it seems that they added a new feature similar to Jajah. Now Raketu has sort of Skype and Jajah combined. Wengo's rates are way too high. I prefer Raketu better.

I have a problem! I tried installing wengophone and didn't find the sound quality good. I immediately uninstalled it. However I am unable to avoid the wengophone on my screen (during the start up and is always there on the bottom screen) although the entire thing has been removed.

Can anyone help me uninstall the whole thing. Its pretty annoying!!!

yeah im all for open source, I have Linux at home, but when it cam to VoIp, first I jumped on the "free software" bandwagon, I did many calls with Wengo, and then, all of the sudden they raised my rates from 2cts/min to 30cts/minute! all of the sudden, so of course,They did not refund my money for these calls at new rates! I changed to skype with 3ct/min rates.
With wengo , I pay:MEXICO MEXICO CITY 0.251€ 0.300€
With Skype I pay: €0,017 (€0,020 incl. VAT)
So maybe your destination is cheaper with Wengo, but I can't be paying 15 times for a service that is too expensive.Thanks Wengo!

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