Brian's Brain

Two weeks back, within my extended rant regarding VUDU's promiscuous and largely undocumented (mis)use of its customers' upstream bandwidth for peer-to-peer video distribution purposes, I mentioned:

I'd like to think that my VUDU experience is atypical, but I fear it'll be increasingly common in the future. I've already mentioned Skype's network nimbleness, and Joost (from the same core developer team) pulls the same tricks, as do Sling Media and another company I'll be writing about in the next few days.

A few days...a few weeks...whatevah. The 'another company' that I was referring to, and that I'll tell you about today, is VoIP provider ooma, whose Analog Devices Blackfin-based gear (so I hear...I haven't yet cracked it open to see for myself) and service I've been testing for the past few months. In retrospect, it wasn't entirely fair to lump ooma in with the others. Although this particular company's does employ P2P techniques, and although it's not particularly upfront about this fact, low bitrate voice traffic doesn't clog broadband WAN connections (and LANs) to the same degree that standard- and high-definition video does. But watch out if you don't have an unlimited local calling plan...

P2P's cost-reduction potential is seemingly key to how the company hopes to survive, since ooma promotes free lifetime U.S. calling after a one-time 'Hub' hardware buy, and especially since a recent management change-induced strategy shift resulted in the cost of that base hardware dropping from $400 to $249 (lumped with a 'Scout' satellite unit that formerly cost $40, to boot...although extra 'Scouts' now cost $60). Unlike most VoIP providers, therefore, ooma doesn't fundamentally rely on monthly service charges for an ongoing revenue stream, although, if you want to make international calls, you'll pay an incremental per-minute fee for the privilege. And, marking another strategy shift, the formerly free-for-life second-line, three-way-calling, expanded-function (i.e. realtime-screened) voicemail and other enhanced features now come with no incremental cost for the first 60 days...after then, ooma Premier capabilities will cost you an incremental $12.95 per month or $99 per year.

But back to P2P; what's ooma doing in this regard? Well nothing, actually, at least in my particular configuration. At minimum, you can configure ooma's service in a traditional standalone VoIP manner, with a unique phone number and all voice traffic (inbound and outbound) flowing over your broadband conection. That's how I've been using ooma. However, you've also got the option to route both an Ethernet connection and your POTS landline into the ooma Hub (which among other things means that if you lose premises power or your broadband connection goes down, you can still make landline-based phone calls), along with optionally porting your existing phone number from your current service provider to ooma.

That particular service slant's not available to me, because as I've mentioned several times before, AT&T doesn't offer 'naked' (i.e. unbundled) DSL service. And, as it turns out, there's another reason why my particular phone plan is unappealing from an ooma standpoint, even if I were to go with an intermediary Call Forward Busy repartitioning approach to landline merging. Since I must have some sort of phone service from AT&T bundled with my DSL service, I went with the absolutely lowest cost package I could find (the $6 metered service plan...since I use VoIP for all long distance calls), which means that I pay 2 cents/minute for local calls beyond the first 90 minutes (I think) of outgoing use per month. But wait...why are we even talking about outgoing local POTS-based calls at all? Ahhh...that's the crux of ooma's P2P approach.

The company's website FAQ is somewhat cryptic about what's going on, saying:

ooma's call-routing algorithm, a/k/a the people-powered network, uses the Internet to connect local calling areas throughout the US for free instead of relying primarily on traditional phone switches, known as the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network). ooma's call-routing technology ensures a completely transparent experience, so the ability to make and receive calls is not impacted when the line is in use by another ooma caller.

And interestingly, now that ooma Premier is part of the company's services suite pitch, the following qualifier recently got added to the explanation;

Customers who purchase or subscribe to ooma Premier are automatically exempted from the people-powered network.

Continue reading with 'Ooma: Peering Details And Hands-On Perspectives'...