GigaOM

Ooma have been very uneven for me so far. I got in the program early thanks to this site (thanks Om!) and was very excited at its potential. Domestic calls have been great, but that wasn’t why I was interested in the product — I can get comparable solutions through Skype and Yahoo! Messenger. International calls were the big deal here. Ooma’s pricing is very competitive. A lot of the rates are half that of Skype’s and slightly less than Yahoo!’s. While the rates were fantastic, service was another story….

Initially, international calls were a mess on Ooma. There were all kinds of connection and voice quality issues. These were sorted out after a few months and the service was very solid. More recently, the company claims to have made “changes” to how international calling works. For the last week, more than half my calls do not go through and the call quality is unacceptable. When I make the same calls on Skype, Yahoo!, or VoIP Discount, the quality is much better, so this is clearly an Ooma issue. Customer Service hasn’t been helpful at all. I get such useful advice as “please try again”, “dial slowly and correctly”, and “please bear with us”. I tried working with customer service on these issues and was surprised to learn that my failed calls don’t show up on their system at all, so they have no idea how unreliable the service has become.

Anyway, Ooma is still just a potentially great product that’s a tough sell. By now the service should be solid, but it’s not. I don’t see how a company can go on a big marketing push when its product doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.

When I start reading that a start up is looking at re-branding a product I run for the exits.

Ommma should have had a subscription type offering from the get go ….$450 up front is just too much for most folks especially when people have been burnt by start ups in the past

if you tell me that the sweet spot for a product is x, and it’s currently priced at 2x, why would i want to buy it now at 2x when i can just wait for the drop to x - especially since you just reduced the price.

mine is still in the box

This explains the problem my wife encountered last night when trying to make an Int’l call to Japan. She told me that every time she dialed, the call automatically dropped.

We’ve never had issues with their Domestic calls but now I’m a bit concerned about their future. Fortunately I didn’t pay the $450 for the box.

Let’s hope they stay around.

Funny that Ooma is now offering a monthly subscription. When I put up a website detailing Ooma’s problems, and offered the suggestion that they needed to do just that for any hope of surviving, I got several calls from Ooma execs, threatening legal action for “slanderous” comments about their product. Now I undestand that those 2 execs are gone.

I don’t feel sorry for anyone who paid $400 for what will likely soon be worthless. There were plenty of web resources (including mine) that pointed out the pit-falls.

Recall that those first early adopter buyers were told that they were getting a “special” price at $399 - they were told they were “saving” $200 off the future “real” price of $599

Now they find out they really paid $150 MORE (and that if they just wait a little longer they will only pay $99).

That’s a great start towards “refurbishing the company’s reputation” and fixing their “black eye”

Hi Raymond and Fernando,

Yes, we have been experiencing problems with our international prepaid billing provider. It is a top priority for us and we are actively working to get this fixed. Our customer’s experience is of utmost concern for us, so we cut our billing provider out of the loop when we can detect an extended outage. Thank you for your patience so far and please continue to let us know about problems you experience so that we can address them promptly.

Dennis Peng

Om is correct that the primary value proposition is making free US calls
 with no monthly charges. This is why we decided to decouple the core 
value of the ooma system from the enhanced features. This allows our
customers to choose which bundle is right for them.



Our new retail bundle offers unlimited US calls with a familiar suite of features (caller-ID, call-waiting, and voicemail) for $249 with no monthly charges. They’ll also get a free trial of ooma Premier, after which they’ll have the option to subscribe for $12.95 per month or $99 per year.


Early ooma customers who purchased the ooma Hub(tm) device for $399 will
 continue to enjoy “ooma Premier” services without monthly charges. This
 package includes the Instant Second Line(tm) feature, real-time message 
screening, Send to Voicemail, Do Not Disturb, a personal number with private voicemail, and more.
 
To show our appreciation to our early customers, we’ll be offering them
 complimentary number porting along with an extended three-year warranty 
(valued at $79 and $69, respectively).



We are very excited about this new pricing model, as we believe it will
 make the ooma system more affordable to consumers and allow
 our customers to decide which package is right for them, whether it’s
 eliminating monthly phone bills for US calling or enjoying all of ooma’s innovative calling features for a low monthly/annual fee.

[...] Malik today posted about the woes of a silicon valley VoIP startup that launched with much fanfare last year. In this post, Om says: the company focused on developing [...]

As long as they’re re-branding, they ought to re-christen the company Dooma and then go after the niche market (tiny, perhaps, but still probably three orders or magnitude larger than their current installed base) of goths addicted to spending a lot on non-functional items.

[...] Malik kindly references our $99 PhoneGnome box in a recent article, in which he says PhoneGnome serves the “end goal of making voice calls [...]

I don’t understand all this talk of Ooma VERSUS PhoneGnome. I’ve got a PhoneGnome box plugged into an Ooma box and it’s a marriage made in heaven (the LINE side of PhoneGnome box connected to the PHONE side of Ooma box). This lets me use Ooma service (free domestic calls) any time on my PC or mobile phone, from anywhere. I can make cheap international calls using either service - this solves the problem with bad call quality on ooma international calls, because I can simply send those calls out via the PhoneGnome service at their (also cheap) rates - the call quality on PhoneGnome international calls has been excellent for me. Some international calls are even free (for the people that register their number in any of the dozen or so countries the service supports) thus extending the no monthly fees and no per call fees for domestic calls provided by ooma to numbers outside the U.S. via PhoneGnome.

Ooma made some kind of update on Friday, which led to me being notified that my service address and password word changed. I called CS to tell them that I did not make any of these changes. They told me that my info was “probably” not changed and to try password recovery. That did not work over the weekend. Thankfully, it worked today, but it’s still pretty ridiculous that I was locked out of my account and couldn’t access my voicemails for three days. That’s unacceptable.

I’m happy with my $400 investment in Ooma - all the features I need, great service, fits seamlessly into my home network, and I don’t pay AT&T any more! (That’s a saving of $70 per month.)

I don’t want to sound like Chris Crocker defending Britney but I am very happy with my Ooma service. In the interest of full disclosure I did take advantage of an invite so I didn’t pay the $400 for the box. Just like STS above I was pretty unhappy with At&t and started looking into other options after At&t charged me $60 for a 10 mins call to Europe. I think that we forget what Ooma is doing here…Ooma is offering an alternative to the 123 year old mammoth company like At&t. It’s not an easy thing to pull off, even Vonage, that raised a lot of money and had some heavy backing got hit with lawsuits. What made me go with Ooma was the positive review that they got from Walt Mossberg of the WSJ fame. The fact that Mossberg allowed Ooma to put a video of him explaining the service on their website (video has been removed since) says a lot. I hope that the company makes hte right choices and is able to take the product mainstream. More choices when it comes to phone services is allways a good thing IMHO.

I just got my unit and scout from amazon today, a total of 250$. I am completely satisfied. I have vonage and will soon drop it. The ooma will pay for itself in 8 or 9 months. If anything else happens after that time period, I will have still came out on top. Vonage has an upfront offer for current customers for 239 a year. Ooma is cleary the winning choice.

The $400 includes lifetime Premier service which is currently priced at $12 something a month. If this Ooma system pans out, the $400 is cheap compared to a monthly fee.

Hey, I’m not sure what the glum and gloom is, I LOVE my Ooma service. The voice quality is indistinguishable from my landline which I kept for a couple of months just to be sure and is FAR better than the quality I experienced using Vonage or Skype, which was awful. I paid $250 for a box and in less than a year, will have broken even compared to most other VOIP options. “Mike Pierce” appears to be a paid shill for the decrepit old world telephone monopolies IMHO, since he has posted the same negative comments on about every blog and forum out there. I would ask of him and other like him- have YOU ACTUALLY TRIED OOMA? If not, please shut up. The pseudo-authority opinion pieces get old, and unless you speak from experience using a product, mean zero to me. My OOm service is solid enough that I plan to give my mother and brother Ooma as gifts this year.

Here’s a thought for all you nay-sayers: If you don’t like it, don’t use it. It’s that simple. I just got one myself and hooked it up without any hassles whatsoever. In eight months this thing will pay for itsself — and I was with Vonage. I’ve had landlines all my life and, although this may come as a shock to some of you, I’ve actually had problems once and a while, and that was a complete nightmare! The big companies are so bloated that just the simple task of calling with a problem means you get transferred from one person to the next to the next to the next…….and have to tell each a detailed description of your problem. Every time I called Ooma’s CS (with questions only) it was a breeze.

I’m just taking a stab at this but one reason I believe they can do what they do for the price is simple — did you see any Ooma commercial during the superbowl? The money they are saving on advertising is being passed along to the customer, and if this even works half as good as it has for me so far, I am going to continue to tell everyone I know to go get one!

One more thing I thought was interesting. I had a hard time cancelling my Vonage account. They really didn’t want me to go, they even tried to keep me by lowering my monthly bill by $10. So, if you’re bent on slamming a company for trying to save folks money, why not go after Vonage for charging people $10 more than they need to every month.

I have had Ooma for a few months now. I love the service. Call quality is great.

The OOma call forwarding technology is a marvelous extension of VoIP.
In the premises, OOma expects a Scout on each extension. Simple rewiring at the punchdown allows OOma to serve two lines to multiple extensions (8 in my building) with one hub and one scout. I could wait for OOma to introduce a multi-line SMB product, but, well, I have already ordered another Hub/Scout set to add two more lines at each extension. For the long haul, I haven’t found another solution which beats OOma for the price or the performance. Call me stupid, but … I appreciate OOma.

I have tried them all (VOIP) and I think ooma is the best yet. Can’t say enough about the product and service. 5 STAR.

I have Ooma for two months now. I think the call quality is as good as my land line. No dropped calls like my cell phone and no monthly bill. I have recommended it to family and friends.

I have also been a happy customer for 4 months. The product does exactly what it says and I sometimes forget I even have it, which is a GOOD thing. I could often times tell I had Vonage which is one of the reasons I didn’t like it. I have referred 3 people who constantly thank me for telling them about it. The big telephone companies should watch out, I could see ooma becoming a serious threat in the next year or two.

I’ll have to say that everything discussed by Mr. Peng above has been delivered on. I’ve been using the Ooma system for several days now, and it is a distinct improvement over my decades long relationship with BellSouth/AT&T.

Voicemail forwarded to email is wonderful.

Your entire phone system being instantly turned into a two line system (by adding their Scout devices) is wonderful.

Unlimited long distance without paying $25 a month for it is … wonderful.

I just hope that this company prospers and is able to provide this service to me for years on end. However, my break even point on the cost of the devices vs the phone bills I won’t be paying anymore come VERY quickly in this process.

I have to agree that the ooma detractors sound like they’re selling short a phone service they probably haven’t even tried. I’ve had ooma since January and it’s really pretty damned good. Occasionally, when I’m downloading files and talking at the same time on my cable-connected system, my callers tell me I’m breaking up… but this is the exception, and not the rule. Ooma is reliabe and the customer service people - especially Dante, rock!

[...] in the year, and customer reviews are overwhelmingly positive. When a number of key executives left the company (we grabbed Sarah Ross, their former CMO), some blogs said they were in big [...]

[...] buy the Ooma. It went on sale on their website in August 2007. When a number of key executives left the company (we grabbed Sarah Ross, their former VP Communications), some blogs said they were in [...]