Transparent Call Proxy

Question

I was wondering if it would be possible to transparently route some calls over VOIP as opposed to the cell radio. My wife has terrible signal issues with her Galaxy S3. Verizon is no help and before she'll let me load a custom ROM she wants me to exhaust all other options. The only other thing I could think of was some way to route some calls over Skype.

I see some other posts about having a home proxy server or a PBX. While that would work it's slightly more involved than I was looking for. I figure there must be some sort of proxy app that could run on the phone itself to watch for who you are calling and act accordingly. Perhaps with Tasker?

Answer 1

No, you can't do this transparently. The dialer app talks directly to the TelephonyManager in Android, which is integrated with the driver for the phone baseband. Even if you could do this, it would only work for outgoing calls anyway: incoming calls would arrive at your phone, and by that point it's too late for an app to do something else with them.

Your best bet is installing a VOIP app and using that. You also have to tell all your wife's contacts to use the VOIP number instead of her phone number (or set up call forwarding with the carrier). But if you're having signal problems, it seems likely you'll have just the same problem with VOIP, unless you're always on Wi-Fi.

Answer 2

The Android dialer has SIP capability, which should come pretty close to what you want. Assuming you have a SIP provider (e.g., Callcentric), you can both send and receive calls over Wifi/data using the native Android dialer. You can configure the dialer to always make calls over SIP when connected to Wifi/data or to prompt you each time you make a call. I don't know how to select automatically based on the number, but you may be able to use Tasker for that.

Instructions for configuring SIP in the dialer are available here.