by OK, not related to work, but worthy of a blog entry at least.
The other day I dove into VOIP for the first time. I admit, I’m a bit of a holdout with regards to my home phone service. I’m also old enough to recall the days when the phone in our house plugged into the wall with that huge 4-prong plug, and Ma Bell engineer(s) needed to do ANYTHING with regards to phone jacks or phones. If you so much as clipped a wire, out came the Bell-Police 🙂 Getting to the point of cutting my AT&T service is emotionally difficult. I’ve ALWAYS had AT&T.
Anyway, I finally decided to switch to VoIP and cut my land line. I’m not there yet, as I’m currently testing out the device first. I opted for an “ooma”, which is essentially a product that’s “VoIP in a box”. You pay for the unit (about $200 US), and that’s it. Everything else is free for as long as you own the unit. No monthly charges, no fees, no regulatory charges, nothing. Free local calls, free long distance. And they support porting your land-line number to the device when you’re ready ($40 fee).
I put this off for such a long time because well, I just didn’t trust VoIP. My brother got skype a few years back; his original calls to be were REALLY bad- long pauses, etc. That left a bad impression.
Thus far with what I have in place however, I’ve been impressed. The setup of the box was easy, and simple tests I’ve done thus far have gone well. It’s pretty neat. I’ve now handed off the device (and a cordless phone I got, just for the Voip line) to my teenaged daughter. If anyone can test how well a phone works, a teen girl is the best option. She’s available for hire if anyone else out there needs phone service tested 🙂
The company’s business model is interesting – pay a larger chunk up front for the device, but then it’s free after that. There are two caveats: Ooma offers “Premium” options (enhanced voicemail, a bunch of other goodoes), that cost $9.95 a month. Not too bad. I don’t need it, but many people opt in. Also, users of the newer units (Ooma “Telo”) need to pay an annual ‘regulatory fee’ of $11.95 a YEAR to cover E911 stuff, etc. [no matter how you slice it, even with a newer Telo unit *and* Premium service, you’re still wayyyyy ahead of the costs associated with Ma Bell].
I’m an old stodgy cheap guy, so I made sure to get one of the generation-1 units (“Ooma core”), whose term-of-service does NOT include any fees of any kind at all, ever.
Will this business model survive? I think so; I think there’s “just” enough premium users to keep money coming in the door, and the newer units are becoming pretty popular as demand increases and word spreads.
Vonage? Works well too, I’m told, but I think they’re up to $25 a month. MagicJack? I don’t know anyone that has one, but that thing needs your *pc* on all the time. Ooma is a totally independent device, which was attractive to me.
Anyway, I’m late in the game, but trying out a VoIP solution that has an interesting twist with the no-more-money-ever cost to it. I’ll keep you updated how it goes.
[Information about ooma is available at http://ooma.com, or find “kcb” at #lopsa]