Using Dialpad with a Ubiquiti UniFi Phone for VoIP Over Wi-Fi!

At CTIA Super Mobility 2015, I met a great group of people in the Startup City area called Switch. A longtime fan of Uber Conference, and their previous service Grand Central (now Google Voice), I wondered how they had such a small booth at such a big show, for such a remarkable company (they’ve raised $119.75m, Rich Miner, Android Co-Founder is on their board, and you *KNOW* that Alphabet is all over their product.)  After getting some info on the service and a handful of UberConference stickers, I signed up for the demo that night.

When I got home, I wanted to see if it would work with some of my devices, but it was still too fresh of a service to have any support of devices that weren’t pretty specific. Fast forward to today, they have re-branded to call themselves Dialpad and they are able to work with most SIP devices, including their hand-selected ObiHai phones (which I am not a fan of and don’t support Wi-Fi), and the Ubiquiti UniFi Android-based phone, which I am a huge fan of. I love this phone because it’s inexpensive, POE powered, it’s pretty much what you would expect of an Android desk phone, and this being a wireless blog, it works extremely well over Wi-Fi. Add power and a service provider and you can take it just about anywhere.

So, naturally I started poking away at the touch screen to figure out how to get it configured, and now that I can successfully place and receive calls, I thought I’d share it with y’all.

About Dialpad

From their site:

Communications for the modern workplace
Dialpad is the people-first phone and meeting system that allows businesses to be more productive when and where they work best.

More from a blog post by the CEO:

We designed Dialpad to fit the real-world needs of today’s workers and the modern enterprise. It provides an easy-to-use, unified dialpad for access to voice, video, text messaging, and meetings across any device—and within other applications, including Microsoft Office 365 and Google for Work.
And yes, we’ll continue to provide UberConference—that’s not going away either.
Our mission is to make using the phone fun, easy, and productive again. It all starts with a dialpad, but it definitely doesn’t end there.

From me: It’s an inexpensive, fast, flexible, and fantastic service. Coupled with the inexpensive and awesomely-Android-based handset that Ubiquiti has cranked out, it’s a great system.

Setting up Dialpad

Now onto the config:

Log in to your Dialpad account at http://dialpad.com/settings

Scroll down to Your Devices and look for the link to “Add a SIP phone”

Please note, if you’re an older Dialpad user like I am, and you’ve added a device or two over time, you might have to get in touch with support to get that link to appear. Not a big deal though, and if you know Dialpad support, you know that they are extremely responsive and very easy to work with.

Type in a name for your phone and hit next.

The credentials that you are offered are what you’re gonna need when you fire up your phone. I’m not gonna post a pic of that for obvious reasons 🙂

Setting up your UniFi phone

I aplologize in advance for the color of the blinds in the office next to mine. I can’t figure out how to get a screenshot on the UniFi phone so I resorted to a traditional screen shot: a picture of the screen.

On the UniFi phone, when you first boot it into the app, it has a quick little welcome screen that you can swipe past. What you are looking for is the “Go To Settings” link on the bottom of the screen.

Tap that and then tap on “SIP service,” then “SIP accounts,” then lastly “Add account.”

Now grab that info from above and pop it in the settings on the phone.

Under server, use the info from Dialpad in the “Domain” section and add port 7060 to the end of it. Check it out: ubervoice.ubervoip.net:7060

Scroll down to Display Name and feel free to put something in there (like the name of the person using the phone) or else you will have your username from Dialpad (the long string you have to type in) show up there! Also, plug something into your Display extension (like the number assigned to the phone) to make it nice and perty.

IMPORTANT STEP: Scroll down to “Registration Expiry” and put the value 180 in there. That way if you change devices, updated the firmware, or software on the UniFi phone, it won’t lock up your Dialpad account.

That’s it!

Not much to it but a few steps and it works very very well.

Conclusion

If you are a looking for a cost-effective way to setup a phone system and you love your life being wireless, this is a great step for you. If you have a traditional wired infrastructure, obviously this will work in that environment too. When you start to dig in to how a service like Dialpad can integrate with your office and allow you to effectively communicate, you’ll be really stoked to see how much time you can save and how efficient you can be. I love it and I hope you do too!

Thanks for reading!

PS: I’m looking into how to get the voicemail component setup right now, so as soon as I get that figured out I’ll update!