TECHdodo

I was reading Andy Abramsonson’s blog where he talked about a new service called Ooma. As I hadn’t heard about it before, I decided to see if I could find out more about it. One of those things where you try to go read all the different blogs and read about all the different opinions about the service and try to figure out what it really does or how it really works.

Andy seemed to think it sounded a lot like Phonegnome. At first read… it really does sound a lot like PhoneGnome. In fact, it sounded almost exactly like PhoneGnome. To get someone to give you 27 million in startup capital though you must be a little different. Right?

One thing that everyone seems to agree on with the Ooma service is that it starts with a $399 box. It sounds like a SIP ATA, but that would be a pretty freaking expensive ATA. In fact it doesn’t seem like that is what it is at all. It seems like it is more of a mini PC maybe with an FXO and FXS port. I decided this after reading this from an article in the Wallstreet Journal where the reviewer, Walt Mossberg said… “Ooma works using the peer-to-peer Internet system popularized by file-sharing sites. Each Ooma box is part of Ooma’s network. The box in your home, for instance, might carry someone else’s phone call…”

Well, that is decidedly not like PhoneGnome… in a bad way. It is more like Skype using P2P to hijack your internet connection to route other people’s calls. This same, “patent pending P2P technology”, is also mentioned in this article at Fortune. This also means that this wouldn’t use SIP and it probably doesn’t follow a standard open protocol. This is really not a good thing in and of itself. It gets worse though.

If the routing of calls through the Internet uses P2P, how do the calls get from the Internet network over to the PSTN network? This is what costs money and someone has to pay for that. How does Ooma plan to offer that for free? The founder, Frame, offers a hint in the same Fortune article when he says, “Ooma has “decentralized the termination architecture. What does that mean? Let’s say you place a call from New York, on your regular old phone, to Palo Alto. The call goes out over the Internet and reaches the local 650 calling region. At that point, it hops onto an Ooma phone and makes a local call to the desired number, without disrupting the local caller’s service.”

The key to what he is saying here appears to be, “it hops onto an Ooma phone.” Is he talking about that $399 box he wants everyone to buy? Is he planning to use my local phone service that I pay for to make the connection to the PSTN network for other people? I don’t really like the sound of that to be honest. That is what it sounds like to me though. What about people who have Ooma boxes but don’t have local phone service? Does Ooma’s service rely on having their subscribers having local phone service?

This idea seems reinforced by their White Rabbit beta program where they are giving away boxes over the summer to establish their network. According to the article, “The idea is to both establish a user base around the country, making all those long-distance-turned-local calls possible…”

More reading and more searching was in order to see if this is really what they plan on doing.

In an article at the NY Times, they also seem to corroborate this idea. “Ooma customers who maintain their landlines help enlarge the network by contributing their connections to a local calling area, allowing another Ooma customer to use it to complete a call.”

So… if you get one of these free boxes in the beta program, they are really hijacking your local phone service so they can route other people’s calls over your phone line when they make their launch? This just can’t be… can it? Yes it seems it can. In fact, in order to participate in their beta program, you have to agree to keep your local phone service. I have also read in several places that if you use Ooma and keep your local phone service, you can also keep your existing number for incoming calls. Can you? If they are hijacking your local phone service to terminate calls to the PSTN wouldn’t your local phone be busy if someone is trying to call you? Also, what about caller id? Is my phone number going to be broadcast for calls made by other people? At the phoneboy blog, they even bring up a more interesting question. If you are maintaining a local phone service for the sole purpose of using 911, which would be exactly why I would maintain it, and your phone line is being used to route someone else’s call, what happens if you need to call 911? Does the call go out? Does the person using your line get their call dropped? In the comment responses, to this post someone stated that is exactly what would happen. The call would be dropped and the 911 call would go out. Do you want to use a phone service where your call can simply be dropped if the line you are using is needed for something else?

Also, if my call is being made through someone’s local phone line, what prevents them from listening to my conversation? I remember we had a party line when I was a kid. You would go to pick up the phone to make a call and someone else might already be using it. You would apologize and then every 5 or 10 minutes you would pick the phone up to see if the line was clear so you could make your call. While other people were using the party line, your phone line was busy. No one could call you, and you couldn’t call anyone else. You also knew your calls were completely open. Anyone else in the same party line could listen to your phone call by simply picking up their phone. I don’t see how Ooma could prevent their users from listening to your conversations. Would anyone really want to use a phone service where total strangers can listen to their phone calls just so they can save a couple of dollars? Certainly not me, no way, no how.

So what is Ooma exactly? Like Andy said, it sounds like Phonegnome. The difference being, as close as I can figure, is that instead of using SIP and a modified ATA like PhoneGnome does, they have their own custom proprietary hardware. Think, a box that implements something like Skype. Then they hijack their users local phone service to terminate their other customer’s calls. I don’t see why PhoneGnome couldn’t do the same thing. In fact you can already use SIP to call into an ATA box and use it to make local calls with your existing phone service. You can do this even without PhoneGnome. The only difference here seems to be that Ooma is going to let everyone else in the world use your phone service too. I mean I certainly wouldn’t recommend PhoneGnome try it, because it seems like a really bad idea, but I don’t see any reason they couldn’t do the same thing.

Based on all this… I wouldn’t take an Ooma box even if they gave me one for free. I have said this before and I am sure I will say it again. It isn’t often that I see a free service that I don’t think is worth what you pay for it. This one certainly qualifies and it costs $399 and the sacrifice of your privacy to join the party. I feel sorry for their investors. 27 million dollars is a lot of money to throw away.