Ashton Kutcher-keep your day job as an actor.
After my initial negative reaction to Ooma-more negative than I've had for a product in a long time-I still think this product is dead-on-arrival, but I have slightly different reasons than before.
The crux of my hatred centered around their "Peer-to-Peer" method of making phone calls. Basically when you make a phone call, it goes over the Internet-encrypted, thankfully-to another Ooma box, or perhaps an Ooma data center, to connect the call to the PSTN. Some "magic" is done "in the cloud" so that the Caller ID is what it should be.
Personally, I think sharing your PSTN line with strangers is a bad idea. That is, quite likely, a violation of the terms of service with the telephone company. Not to mention potentially risky to your own personal safety, even if Ooma does take steps to mitigate that.
According to this interview with Andrew Frame, in the released version, sharing your PSTN line will be optional. That's good, because from what I've heard from a couple of beta participants, they ask some rather personal questions of you-questions I would never provide Ooma answers to. While sharing my PSTN line over the Internet is not a choice I would make, it's your choice to make.
I'm uncomfortable with my calls potentially hitting someone else's PSTN line and the security issues surrounding that. It's not the part between the Ooma boxes that scares me, it's the gap between the Ooma box and the PSTN line that scares the begezus out of me. This could easily be solved by only routing calls to an Ooma data center to connect with the PSTN. If they did that, I would feel much more comfortable with the thought of using an Ooma box.
Putting all that aside, the numbers just don't add up. I don't see how they are going to survive charging $399 for a box-which many of the VoIP bloggers think is too much already-without an obvious source of incremental income. If they take my idea of taking end users PSTN lines out of the call termination equation and sell minutes over IP, then maybe the business model might work. It looks too similar to Sunrocket, which charged $199 for a year's worth of their VoIP-based telephony service. We all know how well that turned out.
Do you thik Ooma is going to survive? Is this another Sunrocket waiting to happen? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
{ 3 } Comments
You wrote: “Some “magic” is done ‘in the cloud’ so that the Caller ID is what it should be.”
I’ve worked too long on telephony related products to believe that there is any “magic” possible to do this. When a call is originated from the OOMA hub into the telephone network on the residentail phone line there are two choices:
1. The Calling Line ID is blocked.
2. The phone number the phone company has assigned to that line is passed to the destination.
There is no loop signaling defined to pass that “magic” to the central office.
Besides, with or without Calling Line ID, the phone company knows where the call came from (your phone line) and you will be blamed for any misuse.
Jeff Peck has confirmed that the Calling Line ID is blocked, that is, you can’t call anyone who has the Anonymous Call Blocking service or who simply won’t answer a call when the Calling Line ID is not displayed.
Good luck.
As inherently insecure is CallerID is, the fact is, people use it. A lot. And if it doesn’t work right, well you’re going to have a lot of unhappy people.
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