Ooma: Peering Details And Hands-On Perspectives

Continued from ‘Ooma’s Peer- and HomePNA-Assisted Dial Tones‘…

ooma’s P2P technique is neatly explained within a paragraph’s worth of a thorough review by SmallNetBuilder:

When you dial a number, ooma first checks to see if the call is a local call. If so, your call is routed through your traditional phone line. If the call is not a local call, the call is routed through the ooma peer-to-peer network. ooma determines if there is an available landline-provisioned ooma Hub within local calling distance of the number you are calling. If so, your call is routed to that ooma Hub, and the call is made using the landline attached to that Hub.

So if I were to go with the landline-integrated version of ooma’s service, my broadband connection would incur traffic not only from my incoming and outgoing calls but also from calls related to other ooma customers. And my POTS connection would also find use in completing those calls…each of which AT&T would count as a local connection, against my metered-plan included-minute limits and per-minute charges thereafter.

P2P cautions (which again don’t factor into my particular setup, so ‘your mileage may vary’) aside, how does the service work? Quite well, in fact…perhaps the best VoIP experience of the numerous service providers I’ve evaluated over the past few years. Admittedly, I don’t use ooma near as often as I do my BroadVoice-based work line, so my comments may have limited statistical relevance. But incoming voice quality is excellent, and the people I’m conversing with don’t complain about my voice quality, either. Voicemail always seems to be up and accessible (though I wish that, like BroadVoice, ooma not only emailed me notification of voicemails waiting for me but also attached them as WAV files…my company contact says this capability is coming in the ‘near future’). And I never get ‘unable to complete this call’ messages that minimally force me to cycle power on my hardware or, often, necessitate a call to BroadVoice tech support and a subsequent delay while the company sorts out and fixes whatever’s gone awry.

Fax service is another bright spot in ooma’s offering, both absolutely and relative to other services I’ve tried. Dialing a *99 prefix ahead of the call signals the Hub hardware to switch from its default voice-focused audio codec (iLBC) to a different, more data-friendly alternative (G.711 non-compressed) for the fax session duration. You still may need to take additional measures in order to ensure full (and repeatable) success, such as disabling the fax machine’s error correction mode or reducing faxed image quality, along with ensuring that nothing else on the LAN is consuming abundant bandwidth at the time. And, you’re ultimately still subject to the inherent impermanence of the Internet. But the audio codec flexibility is a nice touch. And ooma’s future plans include supporting the even more fax-friendly T.38 protocol.

Ooma intends for the Hub to ideally locate between my DSL modem (or another broadband modem) and the router and other LAN equipment. As such, it subsequently handles QoS prioritization of VoIP calls over other WAN traffic, and you can tweak the parameters via a web browser-based user interface. I’ve already got a Linksys unit handling the QoS function, though, so I’ve instead placed my Hub behind my router. It works fine there and, since ooma (unlike VUDU) publishes its port and protocol usage specifications, you can if need be open up requisite firewall holes (I didn’t need to) or use other QoS processors to manage it.

Ooma’s Hub design is an interesting case study on cost-vs-function tradeoffs. As you can see from the earlier discussion in this post, it’s doing more than just traditional VoIP call functions. ooma could, as with the Sipura adapter that my BroadVoice service uses or the Linksys adapter employed by the Vonage service I tried, have just designed a rudimentary SIP unit, perhaps with a blinking LED or few to report voicemail and other status messages to the user, and relying on a tethered telephone’s transducers and touchpad for I/O. Instead, the company decided to include a speaker, along with several user interface buttons, to enable direct access to voicemail, multi-line and conferencing functions. But ooma didn’t take integration to the extreme; you’ll still need (and want, I’d argue) to supply a separate telephone.

And speaking of the Hub, ooma has (at least) one other unique tech trick up its sleeve. The Scout unit (one of which I have operating in my setup…up to four Scouts per Hub are possible) is a cost- and function-reduced version of the Hub, with only RJ-11 ports included (i.e. no Ethernet capability). It doesn’t directly make calls; it instead interacts with the Hub over the home’s telephone wiring in order to initiate and receive calls on either the primary or secondary phone number, for conference-calling purposes, to retrieve voicemails, etc. And how does it interact with the Hub? I had a sneaking suspicion from the beginning that I knew the answer, and ooma’s instructions to put the Hub’s phoneline connection ahead of my DSL filter (and to not put the Scout behind a filter, either) gave me more hints. Finally, my ooma contact definitively confirmed what I’d already deduced; the company leverages HomePNA 1.0. Pretty cool.