Steal This VoIP

Low-budget alternative to ooma

2010-03-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

I've talked before on this site about ooma and how, despite the bad rep from the tech crowd, the company and product have survived and just keep on rolling.

At $200 for the basic service, ooma is a pretty sweet deal. Assuming you're replacing a landline at a baseline cost of $20 per month or more, you break even with a year.

However, if even that is more than you want to spend, and you don't expect to make many calls on your home line, here's a DIY hack that (may be) even cheaper using the PhoneGnome box (or an old unused Linksys/Sipura SPA-3000 if you have one). And this option is easier than Magic Jack if you don't want to leave your computer on all the time.

Officially, PhoneGnome is not a "replacement" service and the company hates being compared to Magic Jack and ooma. Oh well. Here's a DIY hack that works to effectively get rid of your landline and still use standard phones in the house and have a local number that rings at home.

You start with the $99 PhoneGnome device: http://www.phonegnome.com - to save the $99 use their free "upgrade" "Bring your own Device" option to convert a SPA-3000 device: http://www.phonegnome.com/byod.html - get one from Ebay for about $40 (typical price)

When you setup the device at my.phonegnome.com select the No Service Attached option. This is basically their "pure VoIP" option to configure the device as a stand-alone SIP adapter on the PhoneGnome service. Your device will be automatically provisioned with a "VoIP-only" number and this will be your "primary" number as far as PhoneGnome as concerned.

Now you add a phone number and outbound calling service. You can again "Bring your own" since PhoneGnomne fully supports SIP. However, the easy way is to use the "integrated" service options that are built into the my.phonegnome.com provisioning - the prices are competitive, but you can always shop around and configure a third-party service if you wish. I'll only cover using the integrated option here.

Add credits for outbound calling: Sign-in at my.phonegnome.com using your new number and password/PIN (you receive this in an email). Click Buy Credit in the left-hand sidebar under "Quick Links" or click Features / Low Cost Internet Calling. Calls to US numbers are 2.1 cents per minute. Calls to PhoneGnome and other SIP numbers (like Gizmo) are free.

Get a "Home Number": Again at my.phonegnome.com click Features / World Wide Personal Phone Numbers / Purchase and select a phone number. If you want to port your current number, you'll need to contact PhoneGnome - the best way is to click the Trouble Report link at the bottom of the page when signed-in at my.phonegnome.com. Most US numbers are $6.00 setup and $3.25 per month (less if you pay for 3-months or a year at a time in advance). If you don't care about a local number and are really on a budget, you can get a free Washington state number: the PhoneGnome blog describes how.

Done. That's it. With this setup you'll have a local number (or a free Washington state number) that will ring to a normal home telephone and you can make calls, both SIP / VoIP calls (free) and calls to normal telephones. Total investment is $100 (or zero if you already have an SPA-3000 device laying around) plus whatever calls you make.

Caveats: If you make a lot of calls (inside the US, to US numbers), ooma is probably a better deal in the long run. You don't have 911 service in this DIY hack - you will have to rely on your cell phone for 911.

But if you can live with these limitations, this hack gives you a home telephone service on a budget (I won't call it "replacement" service). And it has the advantage of free SIP calls, a free Softphone (something ooma doesn't offer at all), mobile phone integration (poor man's "fixed/mobile convergence") and some geek pluses like APIs and open SIP credentials.

Mobile Phones Surpass Landlines

2009-06-23T10:16:00.000-07:00

Not exactly new, but I guess I missed it last month when the CDC reported that there are now more wireless-only households (20.2%) than landline-only households (14.5%).

The report also noted that Americans who are more likely to have wireless phones only: are adults living only with unrelated adult roommates (60.6%); rent their homes (39.2%); are between the ages of 25 and 29 years old (41.5%); live in poverty (30.9%); or near the poverty level (23.8%).

There are still far more households with both cell phones and landline phones (60%). Among these households with both landline and cellular telephones, almost 1 in 4 (24.4%) receive the majority of calls on their mobile phone. These "wireless-mostly" households, in turn, make up 14.5% of all households.

Voicepulse quietly TRIPLES their rates

2009-06-13T10:02:00.000-07:00

Voicepulse had been offering outbound SIP termination for about a half-penny a minute to many (most) US regions. They had a "flex" rate where rates to each number varied, and some numbers were higher, but many were in this half-penny range.

Well, it looks like around June 8, Voicepulse went to flat-rate for the US but that new rate is 1.9 cents per minute. You could argue that this is FOUR times the old rate, but since it was a flex rate, I'll call it only three times the old rate. But THREE times! All in one day, without any warning.

I would expect anybody who had a large balance at Voicepulse to be really upset by this. There are many services offering better rates. The first punch to Asterisk users was when Voicepulse dropped support for IAX protocol. Now they've slapped us with this outrageous and totally out of the blue rate increase. I'm surprised I haven't seen more talk about this around the net.

How VoIP services define "unlimited"

2009-05-25T11:43:00.000-07:00

I don't understand the legality of it, but they all do it. They all advertise their product as providing "unlimited" free calling - and then put limits on it.

We are used to minute bundles on our cell phones. We buy plans that include 500, or 1000, or whatever "free" minutes per month. However, in the VoIP space, they provide the same type of plan but they call them "unlimited" - I don't get it.

Here are a few examples:

Vonage
The terms and conditions summary defines "unlimited" as "normal use." Looking further, "normal use" is defined as less than 5,000 minutes per line per month.

Comcast
Comcast is less clear, but their terms of service say that they "reserve the right to limit or block any usage as deemed necessary to prevent harm to its network, fraud or abuse."

Skype
Skype places a limit of 10,000 minutes per month on its "unlimited" plan, with a maximum of 6 hours per day.

ooma
According to an Ooma FAQ: "Like all other 'unlimited services,' such as cell phone data plans and other VoIP services, we do have a limit of 3,000 minutes per month (for outbound calling) that we can enforce on a case-by-case basis in the event that a subscriber is clearly abusing the service."

MagicJack
MagicJack is the least clear on the matter. They say they do not have limits, but customers report being disconnected at around the 30 minute mark (some report 60 minutes). Other users have been disconnected after they exceeded a certain unspecified limit of free calls in one month. Recently, their terms of service were modified to define "unlimited" as not more than 20 times average usage. What's average usage? About 100 minutes a month. Apparently, MagicJack is having some difficulties trying to get a handle on what limits they want to enforce on their "unlimited" service.

People often say "It's not lying, it's marketing." Well, maybe - but it is lying, too. The definition of "unlimited" is:

1 : lacking any controls: unrestricted
2 : boundless, infinite
3 : not bounded by exceptions

Further, claiming a service is "unlimited" is a statement of fact, not of opinion, so can't be excused in the same manner as phrases like "bolder than bold."

The other defense you often hear goes like this "I will never hit these limits." I think that completely misses the point. How one uses an "unlimited" plan is completely different than a capped plan, especially a plan that has potential overage charges, as all of the above do. If you know you might get charged if you use more than X minutes per month, you're going to use the phone differently and you're going to want to know whether you're running anywhere near those limits. With the services above, what's even worse is that, in most cases, you can't even check your usage to see if you're near the limit. If you go over the "secret" limit, the company can charge for "overages", without notice and without your prior consent.

It's terribly unfortunate that marketers are allowed to use outright lies like this in their primary marketing message as long as they disclose the actual terms somewhere (buried deep in the fine print). I don't understand how they're allowed to get away with it.

These plans should be called what they are, such as "3,000 minutes per month" - NOT "unlimited" plans.

Ooma vs. Valleywag - Andrew Frame fired or not?

2008-12-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

I've lost track of how many times the VoIP community has written off Ooma and I don't know what Valleywag has against the company or its founder, Andrew Frame, but man, they have hit Ooma hard since day one.

Now Valleywag declares Ooma dead - again

Their latest Ooma story, How Ashton Kutcher killed a startup guy's Hollywood dream, cites an unnamed "tipster" claiming that Frame has been fired by the board. A board member disputes this claim and there have been no official announcements.

People have lost bets over their predictions of the company's demise. Valleywag and these other VoIP pundits must be discouraged by how long Ooma has hung around (a little over a year since the initial public launch). But there are many signs that the business model is struggling. For the holiday season, they are now selling the "core Ooma system" for 199 bucks, down from the original target price of $599. At that price, it's less than the Sunrocket "annual $199 unlimited" plan, often cited as a contributing factor to that company's crash and burn in 2007.

There can't be much gross profit left over for Ooma at a $200 retail end-user price. Bestbuy et al will be taking 30% for sure, leaving $140. Of that, much will go to marketing fees (end caps, and other such), leaving maybe $100-$120 per "core system" in revenue to Ooma. So what are the real COGs of that system? It would be hard to believe they are less than $75 - there is a fair bit of hardware there and Ooma is not big enough to produce in large enough volumes to get their cost down to anything like Linksys levels. So let's say there is $50 in gross profit for Ooma on the $200 sale (I would bet that it is much less than that, if not negative). And we have not factored in any G&A, salaries, operations, support, telephony costs, or other overhead yet. Nor have we factored in other real world costs of selling at retail, like the cost of money, breakage, etc.

How far will that $50 go? It certainly won't pay for much marketing. Vonage spends $250 to acquire each customer. What about the actual cost of providing the service? Ooma is obligated to provide the customer "unlimited" domestic calling (limited to 3000 minutes per month) with no further revenue. What percentage of Ooma hubs are connected to landlines (i.e. can be used to deliver calls)? What is the overall percentage of minutes terminated via another Ooma hub vs. calls terminated at Ooma's expense? Even calls delivered via a hub are not "free" to Ooma - they still have to fund the infrastructure, support, billing, pay for the phone numbers they give customers, etc. If Ooma's original math said they needed to sell the hardware at $500 to make money, it must be hard to make the business work selling it for just $200.

Who knows. Maybe Ooma will prove all its detractors wrong again, although it is hard to see how. But they've done it so far, even with so many pundits lined up against them.

Ooma quietly adds a 3,000 minutes per month limit on their "unlimited" calling

2008-12-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

I didn't see any announcements of this, but it was recently pointed out to me that the Ooma terms of use now includes a limit on "unlimited" calls of 3,000 minutes per month:

In addition you agree that any usage of more than 3,000 minutes per month will be deemed dispositive proof of Prohibited Use. In the event you engage in Prohibited Use, ooma reserves the right to terminate service without notice or, at ooma's sole discretion, to charge you at a rate specified on our Web site for calls that exceed the 3,000-minute per month limitation. This rate may be modified on our Web site from time to time.

That's probably more minutes than most people use. But if you're using less than 3,000 minutes per month, maybe you don't want an unlimited plan at all. You might be better off with a cheap pay as you go, per minute plan, depending on how long you think the Ooma box will last (service is for the life of the box, not the life of the purchaser). Most people will spend less than $20 per month, often far less, paying only for the calls they make. Think about how many calls you make on your cell phone instead your home phone - Ooma won't help you there. Or there are always annual plans like those from Skype and Magicjack to think about ($20-$40 per year - and also have similar monthly usage limits). Such plans equate to 8-10 years of Ooma service, and you don't have to pay so much up front. Will the Ooma hardware (and the company) last 8-10 years? Maybe, but it's something to think about, especially with these new 3000 minute per month limitations.

Is 100K skypephones really a "success"

2008-08-19T11:38:00.000-07:00

UK mobile operator 3 is coming out with the second generation of it's Skypephone. Recently several news stories spoke about the "success" of the 1st gen skypephone, reporting "over 100,000" sold. Since when is 100K handsets a "success"? Perhaps 3 is a very small operator, but certainly Nokia or Apple would not consider that amount sold a "success".

Apple announced during the Macworld 2008 keynote that it sold 4 million iPhones during its first 200 days on sale.

Unlimited mobile calls with PhoneGnome and magicJack

2008-06-01T21:09:00.000-07:00

Here's a nifty way to make (almost) free unlimited calls with your mobile phone using two inexpensive pieces of hardware and your MyFaves (or similar calling circle) service.

There have been mixed reviews of magicJack but a lot of people love their prices - the service provides unlimited domestic calls for $20 a year (that's right, per year) and you can get the first year of service and the USB hardware dongle for $50 (possibly less with a discount code).

This gives you free domestic calls for $20 at home, but how does this help my mobile phone? Well that's where a second VoIP gadget and service, PhoneGnome, comes in. This box is $99 and includes lifetime service.

Normally, one connects an ordinary home phone directly to the magicJack hardware. In this case, instead we will connect the phone through the PhoneGnome box, as shown below:

With this setup, you can use the phone normally for magicJack calls when at home - nothing changes about that - free long distance at home.

But now, here's the mobile trick. PhoneGnome comes with a free cell phone interface for the service called PhoneGnome Mobile Web. It's got a really slick interface on the iPhone but it also works on ordinary mobile phones (you need elemental web browsing, WAP works too).

So how does this give us free calls? We're getting there. You can use the PhoneGnome Moile Web application to place calls using your PhoneGnome account. When you do this, what really happens is PhoneGnome dials a "special" phone number that connects through the PhoneGnome service to the final destination (this is why you can call SIP addresses and IM users etc.) To get that number, make one of these calls (such as to **3 to check your number or some other free ** code) and write down the number that the PhoneGnome app calls - it should appear on your phone when the call is made (and will probably also be in the outgoing calls history on your cell phone). Add this number to your MyFaves plan. Now you can make unlimited US calls for $20 per year. And there's no "two stage" dialing. You just enter the number you want to call on your cell phone in the PhoneGnome Mobile Web application and click the 'Call' button. That's faster and eaiser than some of the other schemes for this kind of thing I've seen (like the allcallsfree/yak4ever hack, before they went out of business).

Now when you make that call from your mobile phone, the PhoneGnome Mobile Web app will dial the "special" number, which is now free because it's in your MyFaves. That call goes to PhoneGnome, which connects through your PhoneGnome box to magicJack and viola - free unlimited domestic minutes on your cell phone.

David Isenberg promotes magicJack

2008-05-20T13:53:00.000-07:00

David Isenberg, a former AT&T scientist who was excommunicated for his radical ideas about the Internet, appears in this magicJack infomercial.

The company also sponsored Isenberg's F2C conference.

F2C's newest sponsor is MagicJack, a clever little device that lets you use any plain old phone as a VOIP phone with no software . . . one of the conference freebies will be a MagicJack plus one year of service.

The "no software" statement is a little misleading. The magicJack is a USB device and while one doesn't have to install software per se, magicJack connects to a PC and is in fact a software application that is running on your PC. Your PC must be powered up and running the magicJack software to receive or place calls.

magicJack appears to be an incredible deal, perhaps not to replace phone service as the company claims (since you have to leave a PC on all the time to use it), but certainly to save money on outbound long-distance calls (in competition with the Skype unlimited plans, for instance). But recently, Boing Boing and others raised red flags on privacy issues and still others question the viability of the company and wonder what's going to happen once they start delivering advertisements, which is apparently the "catch" with this service.

magicJack EULA up to no good?

2008-05-19T18:59:00.000-07:00

Boing Boing first pointed out some concerns with the magicJack end-user license agreement (EULA) which they say requires customers to agree to ads, even with its paid service. This is not uncommon for free phone services, but pretty strange for s service where the customer is paying for the service (and buying the hardware).

In short, it not only has one agree to ads with its paid-for system, but claims that the ads are necessary for it to work. It will also snoop on your calls to target ads more accurately, and has you sign away your legal right to take it to court if it defrauds or otherwise harms you. Delightful.

Neither the EULA itself, nor any other privacy or legal information, can be easily found at its homepage. It's not even provided at the point of sale, where one enters credit card info, email and street addresses as such, so as to gain access to the service and have your MagicJack dongle delivered. I found the EULA's URL through Google.

They also noted something I find really sleazy, a "free trial" counter on the majicJack homepage that is a fake, a javascript applet that increments itself automatically:

// the interval (ms) between new visitors
var interval = Math.round(86400000/perday);

Others have pointed out other potential problems with the "too good to be true" cost of magicJack, such as the savings might be overshadowed by the increase in your electric bill as a result of leaving a heat and power sucking Windows PC on 24 hours a day in order to have phone service.

ooma hanging on

2008-04-24T08:40:00.000-07:00

Om Malik reports: Ooma not dead, yet, the keyword being "yet"

The price of their device + domestic calling plan was supposed to go up in 2008. Those that paid $399 last year, were told they were getting a special price, saving $200 over the "real" $599 price.

Instead, now they learn that they paid $150 MORE.

Om suggests the $99 PhoneGnome as an alternative. It doesn't include unlimited domestic calling, but does offer free calls to 20 something countries, and things like support for mobile phones, voicemail to email, softphone, Asterisk, Skype, and other stuff that ooma doesn't have.

Just because it's black, doesn't mean it's really the same as iPhone

2008-02-10T10:51:00.000-08:00

According to a survey released recently by ChangeWave Research, cell phone users are moving more and more toward Blackberry and iPhone smartphones.

One of the charts from the ChangeWave survey shows that Apple has come closer to hitting customers wants with their first cell phone than all the other phone manufacturers who have been making phones for years.

Since the introduction of the iPhone last year, every phone maker has come out with a copycat phone that looks like the iPhone. But just because a phone looks like an iPhone doesn't mean that it is an IPhone or that it works like the iPhone.

It is just like LG, Motorola, Nokia and the rest of the old-guard of the cell phone business to superficially copy the look of an iPhone and think they have copied the important aspects of it. They are so clueless. They have no idea why people even like the iPhone. It's not because it's black and has nifty icons on a touchscreen (which is all they have copied in their lame copycat phones). It's because the buttons actually work and provide features and functions people actually want in a way that ordinary non-technical people can figure out and use.

The hardcore phone geeks argue why their phone is better by providing a long list of technical specifications and jargon like H264, megapixels, and CPU speeds, but these are't the things that satisfy users. What satisfies users is the overall experience - not what the phone says it does on paper, but what can I do with it, in real life.

And in that regard, Nokia, Motorola, and the rest are light years behind Apple and the iPhone. High-end phones like the $750 Nokia N95 may win on technical specifications but tech. specs. only matter if users can apply them to real world problems and what the research shows is that Apple has done a much better job with that with their first phone than all the existing cell phone makers did with twenty years of experience behind them.

And superficially copying the iPhone is not going to cut it. They are going to have to copy the ease of use, the easy access to all those powerful features to solve real problems, and the highly effective integration that iPhone offers (meaning usable by real mainstream users, not just tech geeks).

Among tech geeks, the attitude is that only people too dumb to figure out a phone like the N95 get an iPhone - so I risk being called a "noob" for praising the iPhone - but the irony is that is groupthink at its worst, supposedly the opposite of what "smart people" do.

It's time for Nokia, Motorola, and also the carriers, Verizon, T-Mobile and the rest to wake up and realize that Apple is on to something - and painting your phone black and giving it a touchscreen is not an effective response.

Is mobile substitution slowing?

2007-12-13T00:00:00.000-08:00

The Associated Press reports that a new federal study finds that more than one out of eight households have cell phones, but don't have the old-fashioned phones. However, the study also finds that the number of households relying solely on cell phones may be growing more slowly than in the past.

What do you think? Could you get by with just a cell phone, and without your traditional landline telephone?

Skype dominates VoIP (at least outside US)

2007-12-11T10:17:00.000-08:00

According to IT Wire, Skype accounts for 95% of all VOIP on the net, but only 1% of the bandwidth. The study claims to have looked at three petabytes of anonymous data representing over one million users in Australia, Eastern Europe, Germany, the Middle East and Southern Europe during August and September 2007

P2P (file sharing) is the dominant consumer of bandwidth, accounting for over 90% of Internet bandwidth during the night, according to the research.

VOIP.COM customer story

2007-10-31T10:48:00.000-07:00

These stories happen all the time. There is probably at last one such case for every service provider ever. One customer can have all the bad luck, so one story doesn't make or break a product, but I found this saga by a VOIP.COM user almost moving: I Give Up!

One of the striking things I saw in there is this:

when the techs do talk and they tell you we really don't guarantee you phone service - you should only use a regular land line for any communications because VOIP.COM is not to be considered reliable (actually had one person tell me that)

If that's true, it's pretty incredible. What does it say about the state of VoIP?

Jaxtr - the dirty details

2007-10-27T11:24:00.000-07:00

With all the "free calls" sites and services out there it can be very confusing. A lot of people are looking for free calls to India. Most services don't include places with higher costs such as India, in their "free calls" supported countries. Jaxtr is (or at least was) an exception. Except now people are starting to report problems:
** You cannot call to the same number second time.
** US Local number what they provide never function.
** Sudden disconnect the calls while talking.
** only US people have 100 Minutes, all other country they allow only 3 - 16 minutes per month as rollover.

Comcast messing with VoIP?

2007-10-08T09:33:00.000-07:00

Where there's smoke, is there fire?

It's a story that won't go away and the complaints are getting louder.

Andy Abramson:

I'm not at all surprised to read that one of the nation's largest cable operators is getting accused of packet shaping. Nor am I surprised that their support folks are being mum on the subject.

It seems thought some unhappy Comcast customers are happy to write about their issues which directly impact the ability to use real time apps like video conferencing and VoIP rather well.

Earlier, Light Reading reported on the issues too. “We’re not blocking access to any application, and we don’t throttle any traffic,” said Charlie Douglas, a Comcast spokesman. Note that Douglas didn’t explicitly deny the use of deep packet inspection or traffic shaping products. ”Comcast has a responsibility to manage our network to ensure our customers have the best service, and we use available technologies to do so.”

Their marketing tends to center around faster speeds than DSL, but the practice of download caps and traffic shaping could neutralize that advantage for real customers.

Voip hacker headed for jail

2007-09-28T00:30:00.000-07:00

His boss supposedly ran off with one million bucks, but Robert Moore, the operation's technical muscle, only got $20,000 - and federal prison.

Moore hacked 15 VoIP companies and allegedly stole and then sold more than 10 million minutes back in 2005.

Information Week has the full story and an interview (very interesting stuff)

Moore, 23, will begin his two-year jail sentence this week.

MartinTibbitts: Ooma is a "leaky PBX"

2007-09-28T00:09:00.000-07:00

I've never heard this term before, but Martin says "Leaky PBX" was a term from the mid 90s that applied to PBX systems that did toll-bypass through "back door" means - as a result they were shut down. He says ooma is doing essentially the same thing and adds:

Neat trick! But will it fly? Honestly, I fully expect lawsuits to fly here. Ooma is clearly violating the intent of the law here…as well as engaging oblivious users to violate their agreements with the local phone companies (RBOCs) and engage in unlicensed long distance termination. Honestly, knowing how the RBOCs legal strategies work, I expect them to jump on this hard….after waiting to see if Ooma makes any impact at all.

Indeed. That last point is a key one. The phone companies are not going to waste a lot of time and money on ooma, if they don't end up being much of a player, and simply fade into oblivion on their own.

How can I get free VoIP?

2007-09-19T21:49:00.000-07:00

As someone said, there is no free lunch. However, there are some companies providing free, or near free calling, usually with certain limits.

Before we get to that, let's talk about what's not free. Paying $25 per month to get "free" calls is not free. Therefore, we're not talking about such things here.

The main reason that VoIP companies offer free calls of one kind or another is to lure customers into purchasing credits to make calls to paid destinations. But we have to realize that while VoIP calls are very cheap, they are not completely free. Somebody is paying for the "free" calls and eventually those chickens have to come home to roost.

PC to PC, and PC to Phone calls

There are many services available for calling from a PC to someone on a PC, Skype being the most well known. You can call inside the Skype network for free. But if you want to make calls to regular landlines, you'll have to pay. The subscription fee for calls in North America is $30 per year. It's not a great deal of money but it still isn't free (this option applies only to calls made from within the US and Canada).

Other services in this group include GizmoProject, Free World Dialup, and dozens of others.

Phone to Phone

There are fewer choices for free calling from a regular phone to a regular phone. Here are three of note:

Jajah

Jajah doesn't push their free calling aspect very much. They are more often described as a way of making cheap calls. The way the service works is you register your number and if the person you're calling also registers, you can call each other free, if you initiate the call at the Jajah website. There is a lot of fine print on "free" calls and perhaps this is why the service isn't well known for this feature - but supposedly you can do it.

PhoneGnome

PhoneGnome is a very inconspicuous service that works like Jajah above, but the service appears to focus on free calls between members more than paid calls (which are almost hidden on the website). People can register their numbers and then call each other free. The service is free for both mobile phones and landlines in the US and Canada, but landlines-only outside the US. Other numbers can use the service, but they must pay a per minute fee to place calls.

Both PhoneGnome and Jajah have somewhat complicated pricing schemes for paid calls, that is, calls made from or to numbers that are not free (for whatever reason).

Both companies also have so-called "Fair Use" policies that put restrictions on the volume of free calls - but this is reasonable given that these companies are giving us something for nothing.

Jajah says the following:

JAJAH asks its customers to pay from time to time. If you choose not to pay, JAJAH may need to limit your free minutes. To take advantage of free minutes, users should deposit funds into their JAJAH account.

Again, I'd say that's fair. A lot of people complain that this kind of thing is a "rip-off", but I disagree. When they start playing bait and switch, that's one thing, but I think placing reasonable limits is perfectly fine, as long as they are transparent about it. You are getting a free service after all.

One thing I don't think is reasonable is the practice of random charges out of the blue, without warning, which has been reported about some of the services like VoIPcheap, VoIPbuster etc.

Jaxtr

Jaxtr is another similar service, except instead of the service calling your phone when you place a call and then connecting you to the called party (which is how the above two work), with Jaxtr, the people that want to call you get a local telephone number to call you on. Instead of phone numbers, you know "friends" on Jaxtr by their email address. Jaxtr gives you a number for each "friend" (that is supposed to be local to you). When you call one of these numbers, it rings to that friends real phone (but you never need to give out your actual number).

Jaxtr limits users to a certain number of free calling credits each month and this seems to vary with the kind of account one has (they call them "jax") And, again, there is a complex scheme for the actual call costs (reminds me of "message units"). At this time, Jaxtr is still in Beta, and doesn't offer a way to buy additional credits.

Final Thoughts

Another important note. All this free calling generally applies to the same set of countries, or more directly, it always excludes places where there are few low-cost calling options, such as India, Africa, and the Middle East. There are VoIP options, including those listed above, that might be able to save some money for calls to/from these regions, but there are no free options. (If you're willing to buy a $99 hardware box, you can use the PhoneGnome service free in any of these regions).

In conclusion, as we state above, there really is no such thing as completely free VoIP, but there are ways to make zero-cost calls and significantly reduce your phone bills using a combination of free and low-cost calling options. This means that you will need to put some time and research into it, but in the end you can achieve almost free calls using VoIP technology and services.

Voipbuster - Free for the mathematically challenged

2007-09-12T16:55:00.001-07:00

We often see people talking about getting "free" calls by using Voipbuster.

I don't get it. If I understand correctly, the way it works is you have to give them 10 EUR (about $15 USD) and that qualifies you for a maximum of 300 minutes of "free" calls per week to specific "free" locations for a few months (each call limited to one hour). Then you have to "top up" (put in another $15) to make more "free" calls.

When I do that math, it sounds more like I'm paying $60 per year for a limited amount of "free" calls. Regardless of the annual total, it sure as heck isn't "free" - and you still have to pay for calls to "non-free" numbers (most mobiles outside the U.S., India, etc).

Wikipedia says

"company continuously increases its prices in some hidden ways. It changes terms constantly without notice"

and

"Latest feature seems that the 10 euros you pay to get 'free nations' can no longer be used as credit, you lose the money after 90 days. Any non-free destinations need a separate 10 euro credit."

I don't understand how this company has such a great reputation on the blogs.

In short, caveat emptor.

Note: The company behind Voipbuster, Betamax GmbH & Co KG, runs dozens of other services under many different names, all with a similar scheme (see this site for more information).

A ShoePhone? Really?

2007-09-12T15:28:00.001-07:00

Well, not really. If you thought the VoIP company and product names weren't already bad enough, the latest is ShoePhone - no seriously.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have anything to do with Maxwell Smart... or shoes. It's a VoIP conference call system, or something like that. They call it "Interactive Conversations".

It looks like you can call it with SIP at the address sip:123@66.212.134.192 so you could use it free (I think) from an Asterisk PBX or any voip system that lets you call SIP addresses. For now, the service is free and allows up to 250 people to participate in a session (talk, listen, text-chat).

I have to say, the website is pretty confusing. I can't figure out how to use the service or software (or whether the service can be used without their software) but it looks like there might be something under there, once I do figure it out.

FierceVoIP - VoIP devices

2007-09-11T16:55:00.000-07:00

Two similar but different VoIP devices to augment home wireline with VoIP:
PhoneGnome: PhoneGnome answers ooma's call
ooma: ooma chief talks with FierceVoIP

There's a bit of a debate in the comments to both articles, with rabid supporters in each camp.

There is a really interesting tidbit in one of the comments from the PhoneGnome CEO:

The PhoneGnome box could be plugged into the Ooma box to enhance (or augment) the ooma service with additional features and capabilities, whereas the reverse doesn't apply to the ooma box. A PhoneGnome box would augment the user of ooma service with new features like (1) softphone (use your ooma account on your PC at Starbucks); (2) use ooma service on your mobile phone; (3) use an alternative VoIP provider for international calls to get cheaper rates (or even free); (4) use your Ooma service from alternative locations (say outside the US to make free calls to anyone in the US, or on a wi-fi phone from a hotspot).

I think this means that one could connect the PhoneGnome box to an Ooma service and then set it up so one could place calls via SIP to anyone in the U.S. In other words, I could use a wi-fi phone at work to make free calls to anybody in the U.S. Or I could call any U.S. number free from outside the U.S. (say from India to the U.S.) I guess I could do the same thing by connecting the PhoneGnome box to a Vonage account for that matter, but it's an interesting twist to the Ooma line sharing scheme.

Two Jons Disagree About Ooma

2007-09-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

Just as Jon Arnold reports that he likes Ooma, another Jon, Jonathan Greene at atmaspheric | endeavors complains about several annoyances including: "an audible buzzing background sound [that makes] it very difficult to hear the other party" and issues with outbound caller ID (the Caller ID the person he calls sees).

CallerID is apparently hidden for “Security Reasons” by default, but you can enable it on outgoing calls by dialing *82. I expressed my discontent with this option and suggested it be a one time activation with the option to block as needed - the way everyone else handles it.

Jon Arnold, on the other hand, says:

Ooma works, and I think it's a well designed product. That's the easy part in my mind. Getting this to market and convincing people to spend this kind of money upfront from an unknown company will be the real challenge in my mind. Right now, Oooma is very Voice 1.0

We should note that neither person actually paid the $400 for their Ooma box - they got it free as a beta tester.

Brett Arends recommends DIY VoiP

2007-08-27T22:21:00.000-07:00

In his article “Skip Skype, Vonage: Get VoIP for Next to Nothing” Brett Arends describes how easy it is to setup VoIP on your own and wonders

"how any telephone companies, including voice over Internet providers, are going to make any money at all down the road."

In this case, he must mean by "voice over Internet provider" companies like Vonage because he uses a VoIP service provider account in the DIY setup too (a Gizmoproject/SIPphone account).

It should be noted that Brett's DIY setup is a bit of an apples and oranges comparison with a Vonage service, because Vonage (and all the other companies offering more or less the same thing) offer a full replacement for a landline, including services like forwarding, voicemail, and (in particular) 911. Also, if you are paying Vonage $25 a month, it's more likely that they will take your call if you need technical support, whereas most DIY service providers offer little or no support (ironically, almost none of them have telephone numbers that you can call).

The DIY setup described in the article WILL NOT provide 911 service (or 411, 511 etc.) That's something to be aware of. Depending on the provider, it may or may not include voicemail, but even it it does, it is unlikely to be as seamless or integrated as a Vonage service.

I also think the article overstates how "easy" it is. While the Voxilla configurator is a terrific tool, many (most?) mainstream users would be overwhelmed in trying to repeat the setup Mr. Arends describes. And if anything goes wrong, they will be up a creek.

I'm not suggesting that Vonage (or one of their competitors) is a better choice, I'm simply pointing out that, to be fair, it is not a apples to apples comparison.

Emails to info@ooma.com go unanswered

2007-08-25T09:03:00.000-07:00

Ooma claims to be different than all the other VoIP startups. However, just like most the rest, they ignore queries from customers. I have sent several emails to info@ooma.com and have yet to receive a single reply.

Update: I did finally get a response to one of my questions. I asked about 911 when using ooma without a landline. They don't support this usage yet (they require a landline) but when they do, then your 911 calls will be routed over the internet with the address you register with ooma - so it seems that ooma essentially gives you the equivalent of a Vonage-type "broadband phone service" (in FCC lingo this is a "replacement" service) with unlimited calls to the U.S. for the price of the box up-front, instead of a monthly fee. Like Skype and their supernodes, it would seem that if nobody actually has a lineline, the ooma business model falls apart.

Techie puts up "Ooma Revealed" site

2007-08-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

Mike Pierce has started a web site at ooma-revealed.info where he dissects the new "free US domestic calls for life" startup Ooma

Mike says:

I hope that this provides the information that prospective subscribers will need to evaluate the product in regards to its pros and cons.

Although I have to say I don't see many "pros" on the site, mostly just "cons". The site details various technical, operational, legal, and security/privacy "issues" (i.e. problems) with the Ooma approach, characterizing many as "fundamental errors in the plan... that cannot be fixed by engineers."

Mike points out one of the biggest ironies with the Ooma's claims.

They further claim that they are letting everyone have "the right to screen calls" and then define a system in which normal calls from an Ooma subscriber to a PSTN subscriber will have the Calling Line ID blocked, thus denying the PSTN subscriber this "inalienable right".

The site includes some interesting recommendations for using the service, including this tidbit:

Whenever placing a call over the Ooma network, begin the call with *82 to force the call through a "secure" Ooma Gateway and to include Calling Line ID so that your friends who screen their calls will answer.

Update: per the comment from Mike P to this post, the ooma-revealed.info site was taken down - a copy of the website is available for download here (per Markus Göbel's Tech News).