ooma hanging on

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

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?

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)

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

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

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?

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.