Personal SIP is a IS&T service currently in beta. It is associated with the Kerberos username that you establish when you arrive at MIT. Activating your account also provides you an MIT phone number that you will keep though your stay at MIT. You can receive voicemail in your MIT email inbox or forward that phone number to your cell phone or any other telephone.
This service is not intended to be a telephone or VoIP solution. While the list of supported features for Personal SIP Accounts is fairly small, the service is built to follow SIP standards and can be used with a number of SIP related software packages to place and receive calls over the internet. Please remember, IS&T does not support these software packages or setting them up. For help configuring or using your personal SIP Account, please fill out a request with the Residential Computing Consultants at http://rcc.mit.edu.
As mentioned above, this service is currently in beta. That means that there is limited support available from IS&T. This does not mean that it's availability is limited. Anyone can activate their Personal SIP Account by going to the Personal SIP Account activation page. Personal SIP Accounts have been automatically activated for students living in NW35, Burton-Conner (W51), MacGregor (W61) and Kappa Alpha Theta house, formerly Green Hall (W5).
The service consists of a few parts:
- A unique SIP address (typically looks the same as your email address: kerberos@mit.edu)
- An phone number. This is an alias to your SIP Account.
- Automatic voicemail-to-email forwarding to your MIT email inbox
- A web based utility to configure your Account options.
Instructions for using your Personal SIP Account can be found at the IS&T Personal SIP pages. Below you can find links to instructions for supported tasks.
- Forward your MIT phone number (Personal SIP) to your cell phone or any other phone number
Forward to your cell phone - Setting up caller allow and deny lists
Allow/Deny lists - Receive voicemail in your MIT email inbox
Setup your account to forward unanswered calls to voicemail. Any voicemail that you receive in this account will automatically be forwarded to your MIT email account as an audio attachment. - Modify your account settings
Personal SIP Account management page
Support for configuring or using the above features is offered through the Residential Computing Consultants. Please remember that the RCCs cannot at this time offer official support on configuring soft-phone clients, calling other voice over IP users or using any other SIP-based software. There is a community wiki available at https://wikis.mit.edu/confluence/display/SIP/SIP+Users+at+MIT that has some information regarding how to configure a soft-phone and other unsupported actions. Please feel free to contribute to this wiki space.
There exists software that allows Personal SIP Accounts to be used for voice communication similar to Skype (Skype itself will not work with P-SIP.) IS&T does not support setting up or using this software. Personal SIP Accounts cannot be used to make calls to off campus phone numbers.