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New VoIP Service Promises A Better Life! |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Friday, 20 July 2007 |
Giving away unlimited domestic phone calls for life is certainly a good
way to get a business started, but does ooma really have the disruptive
potential to fulfil its enthusiastic claims?
Since founding ooma in 2005, CEO Andrew Frame has been developing
the ooma hardware and software with a team of engineers experienced in
embedded system development, VoIP, carrier operations, hardware
engineering, high volume consumer devices, Linux and operations support
systems.
Frame, formerly of Cisco, put the co-founder of TiVo
(Mike Ramsay), Ariba (Keith Krach) and Napster (Sean Parker) in a room
with a bunch of people from places like APple, Yahoo!, Redback Netowrks
and Cisco along with about US$27 million in venture funding to come up
witha better way to do telephony.
The solution is ooma - a pricey US$400 Linux-based gateway
device that plugs into the customer's broadband
connection and existing land line connection. Wake me up when your done.
What ooma plans to do is make money from its hardware sales and then leverage the landlines of each and every Ooma
user hooked up to the system to form a peer-to-peer mesh across the
United States. Each installation can be
used as a gateway to route calls from Interstate callers to their
destination.
The company says it doesn't affect your own system to do this, though presumably it affects your bandwidth usage.
As the call is routed to its destination phone on the local operator's
land line network there would be no termination cost. So the service is for
free across the U.S. and would be impossible to replicate in Australia. International calls will be charged at a
per-minute rate, just like any other VoIP service.
The key to this working of course is to have a good strong grid of
users across the country to increase capacity and there was no mention
of how a relative small number of users in one area might be protected
if everybody want to call into their city.
"ooma is poised to change the
telecommunications category, in much the same way that TiVo changed the
landscape of broadcast television," said TiVo's Co-Founder Mike Ramsay, who is on the ooma Board. "The
ooma device gives consumers a better way to connect to each other with
ease of use and lower cost while, at the same time, providing a
platform to receive future services delivered directly from ooma."
Exciting claims, but there seems little in the announcement to get
excited about. The company's press release suggests the ooma system
"provides a better phone experience, by enabling unlimited U.S.
domestic calls via a broadband connection". Well that's a good deal to
be sure, but does it really provide a "better phone experience"?
ooma it says is "an innovative consumer technology dedicated to
transforming home telephony from being service-oriented to
device-oriented and delivers a new way of calling that brings
significant long distance cost savings to consumers."
Move
along, nothing to see here.
The company is going to have to come up
with some real useful services for this orientation to realise its
dream of a viral future for the service. During Beta the promise is
that the system acts as an Answering Machine and provides a way to
manage voice mail and call settings online. Presumably they have more than that on offer.
From the outside, the ooma "experience" seems little more than a
blend of standard Skype-style peer-to-peer Internet Telephony with a
dedicated ATA (analog telephone adapter). There are also ooma 'Scout's'
which are extension devices for each extra phone. As usual, the VoIP
service is not offered as a telephone replacement but as a Second Line.
At a starting price of US$400 ooma is competing with traditional
all-you-can-eat domectic calling plans priced at about US$20-$30 per
month. The company's first challenge may be to convince users the
service will survive long enough to make back their investment.
www.ooma.com
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