New VOIP startup Ooma, which is proving a free phone service to U.S. residents who purchase the basic hardware, started taking pre-orders about five minutes ago (6 AM PST). Orders are being taken by phone only, with delivery guaranteed before September 10. The phone number to call is 866-452-6662.
The basic unit, called a “hub,” is $399. Additional “scouts” which you can plug into the various phone jacks in our house cost $40 each. Sales tax is being collected on top of that for California deliveries. Once you’ve purchased the hardware, all calls to U.S. numbers are free. International calls are at Skype-like prices.
I don’t expect to see millions of people calling to buy an Ooma today. But for the early adopter crowd, this may be something they want to try out. I’ve been testing it for a few weeks and the call quality is good.
While looking for a new cordless phone yesterday, Amazon offered me this one:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ.....B000RI5VH2
It looks like it’s the same technology as Ooma for $129. Says, “Make free domestic and international calls between Globarange phones around the world for three years with joip service”.
No idea if it is the same on the backend.
What Im curious about is if this ooma can record calls, Mike were you able to record any calls with this device. And if so was there any echoing?
I’d like to use it for podcasting when speaking with someone over the net but wasnt sure if it was capable and how the quality of the call would be with a conference call.
Mike as much as I like the concept of Ooma you are starting to read like a Ooma schill…
sean3 - you cannot use ooma to record calls.
Matt_ - Yeah I can understand that. But I thought it worthwhile to post this to let people know they can buy it. I doubt I’ll be posting again about them any time soon. And, this is a product I really like.
I didn’t win one…
This is an over-priced product from a zombie company. The sunrocket failure means the death of voip startups especially ones requiring a big up front costs.
Who needs the hassles of having a startup sink while holding your phone number, and then have them sell your info to the highest bidder in the liquidation sale, brick the hardware you invested in, and screw up any transfer requests during your evacuation?
I am missing the Ooma value proposition. For $399 + $39 for another “scout” box, I can get free long distance and voicemail, and I need to keep my regular phone line.
Right now on top of my regular phone line (local + local toll), I pay…$15…to AT&T for unlimited long distance.
So it would take 29 months (438/15) of Ooma service to break even on my AT&T. Where is the value proposition?
How many people make that many long distance calls at home anymore anyway? Almost all my calls are from my cell phone.
They will be in the deadpool in 2 years, perhaps…then you are stuck. Where is AT&T going?
(Note: I hate AT&T!)
Yeah, I don’t have high hopes for Ooma. I think the name is tough. But, we’ll see.
Doesn’t call quality have more to do with whether or not the ISP is provisioning the voice packet? I believe so.
There are a number of factors that can determine the overall quality of a residential VoIP call placed over a typical home broadband connection (DSL or Cable for the purposes of this post).
Regardless of your provider, if you are having quality of service issues like dropped calls, echo, garbled calls, etc…..pop open a command prompt on your PC and do a traceroute to your providers proxy address.
Chances are, you are traversing a shit-ton of routers (hops) and incurring hundreds of milliseconds of latency. That is why it is easier for the network provider to roll out quality VoIP services, because they can deploy QoS mechanisms all along the IP call route to ensure the voice packets have smooth sailing.
Independents have no control over the “last mile”, which is a problem for them.
Improvements in codecs and voice friendly QoS technology becoming more inherent in network routing and switching infrastructure will gradually alleviate these issues.
You folks should check out http://www.magicjack.com. It is much cheaper and works great (I have been using it as my primary home phone for 2 months).
So what ever happen to the invites that were supposed to make there way to invite share from the 50 that were given away last month?
I won the TC/OOMA comment challenge but still have not received my unit. I doubt I’ll ever get it.
So if you make an outbound call via someone elses ooma does their phone # show up on caller id or do they block it (in which case many folks wont answer a call from “private”
interesting to keep an eye on and see what happens.
BC & Andrews - the fifty invites were given away, but they haven’t shipped yet. As soon as people get them, I’m hoping that they use the tokens on InviteShare.
It should be possible to detect the callerID of the caller, and pass it through the Ooma peer’s PSTN connection, in essence, “spoof” it. I don’t know if they retain the original CallerID or not, or what hack/mechanism they might employ to do so.
Just listened to the podcast.
Ooma sounds awesome - Andrew’s explanation was great.
I am most curious about call quality. Because of Vonage’s dependence on my Internet connection, my Internet activity adversely affected call quality (a lot!). That’s why I am dropping them in deference to a Cable-based VOIP (as they use dedicated bandwidth for phone versus shared for Vonage et al). Since this is just a network device, I suspect it’ll have the same issues.
Anyone know?
If you speak Chinese, italkBB.com is a great value.
I use it to call China for free (I have relatives there).
Hey, do you think you could post an unboxing article on ooma? You really should dedicate more coverage to this blazing hot tech company on TC!!!!!
Really, early adopters aren’t using landlines anymore… they all have cellphones with more than enough minutes or are using Skype.
This blog is getting worse than SvN…
Come on guys give Michael a break…he loves the product he has a right to be excited about it…
Wonder why GigaOm which talks about everything to do with VOIP hasnt given that much coverage to Ooma..
oops looks like GigaOm did mention the launch of OOma today
Same concern as listed above, only worse. In NYC, taxes and fees make having the most basic of phone lines a $30+/month proposition. If I have to keep my land line, it’s really no great savings.
Patrica above wrote:
>>>Yeah, I don’t have high hopes for Ooma. I think the name is tough. But, we’ll see.
How crucial are start-up names? And who’s choosing/designing them? And is there any prior testing (other than family and friends) involved? THAT might make for an interesting post down the road.
Mike, What about MagicJack (http://www.magicjack.com). My friend pointed me to that site when i showed him this link. What do you think about it?
It would be nice to know who the 50 invites were. is there any way we can find out who the 50 are?
Retaining the landline is an option left to the consumer.
If landline reliability and real 911 are important to the user, the $20 they pay for a basic landline can be considered a form of “insurance” for some peace of mind. For our part, we offer a completely integrated experience that combines the best of both the PSTN and VoIP, unlike the “ships in the night” operation of these services today.
On the other hand, if reliability and safety are elements of phone service that aren’t important to you, cut the cord (perhaps you already have) and ooma will offer the same set of services, all over the broadband.
The limited time pricing of $399 applies to either case, and includes the ooma Hub as well as the premium services (the Instant Second Line and the Broadband Answering Machine features) - all with no monthly fees.
Dennis Peng
ooma
over-priced. Most of these market creators need to take a page from technology marketing books (I tried to think of the name of the book I just read but I completely forget, it’s a part of the Marketing Gurus summary pack). This company may be doomed to fail or not actually hit the curve that is necessary. Many people in this world don’t even know what VoIP is (…terribly sad), let alone will wish to follow the early adopters to the levels of the pragmatists. This service/product needs to find a niche and the best way to do that is through sites such as the blogs as well as the mainstream media.
Cool new gadget, I hope it will survive and prosper tremendously.
Um, Mike is your math off? This is not Free (ie zero cost) if you need to keep your home phone line! With vonage or any true VOIP solution you get to toss your phone line which means the costs are lower.
Case in point. I use VoicePulse which charges me $15 a month for unlimited local and regional calls and 200 min of LD a month (all I need). Just to keep a land line, even if you don’t make any calls on it, is ~$15/mo, so where’s the savings? And with Vonage or VoicePulse I don’t have to but hundreds of dollars of equipment to use it.
Ooma is great, but Michael, why don’t you tell the TC readers that Ooma will remains the right to charge after three years?
… sure, it’s understandable, I mean every company needs to get money… but I wonder why people always talk about ‘lifetime unlimited calls’…
That’s what their web page says:
“*Your one-time purchase of the ooma Hub™ device means you won’t owe monthly charges to ooma for unlimited calls in the United States for at least three years.”