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Reports: Ooma's VoIP Service Goes Down for Half a Day

TMCnews Featured Article


April 14, 2009

Reports: Ooma's VoIP Service Goes Down for Half a Day

By Patrick Barnard, Group Managing Editor, TMCnet


Ooma Inc.’s increasingly popular Internet phone service was reportedly out of commission for about half the day on Monday, and service was still spotty at the end of the day, according to published reports.


The VoIP service, which is provided free with the purchase of a Ooma box, was reportedly interrupted at about 11 a.m. and was partially restored shortly before 5 p.m.

No word on how many customers were affected.

By late Monday the Palo Alto (News - Alert), Calif.-based company still had not offered an explanation, but Chief Marketing Officer Rich Buchanan had reportedly acknowledged the problems via Twitter.

Ooma’s VoIP phone system, which enables free long distance calls, has been increasing in popularity since it was first introduced in 2007. The appliance, which sells for about $250, is sold in Best Buy stores, as well as other electronics chains including Fry’s Electronics and Micro Center.

Eric Stang, who became president and CEO of Ooma in January, said recently that the company is on track to have $15 million to $20 million of revenue in 2009, with virtually no advertising. He said he expects Ooma to be profitable at year’s end.

Ooma made news in January when it introduced the Telo -- a powerful cordless handset featuring DECT (News - Alert) 6.0 technology, high-definition voice, connected phonebook, mobile transfer, speaker phone, and musical ring tones.  The phone comes integrated with Ooma’s VoIP software.

“Simply put, Telo sounds better, connects better and works better than any traditional phone or VoIP service available today,” Buchanan said in a release. “Telo represents the necessary evolution of communication in the home and helps combine the home phone and cell phone so you can enjoy the benefits of both without any compromises.”

More recently, Ooma made news when it announced that its VoIP service can now be integrated with Google Voice, Google’s (News - Alert) free, new, on-demand VoIP service which adds new functionality to existing phone lines.

Google Voice -- formerly GrandCentral -- was relaunched on March 11, with new features, including voicemail transcriptions and SMS managing. Current GrandCentral customers will be able to transfer their accounts to Google Voice, and Google announced that the service would start accepting new members soon.

Integration between the two services will open up a slew of new features and functionality for Ooma subscribers. For example, with Ooma Premier’s Google Voice Extensions, Ooma can automatically display a Google Voice caller-ID each time a user makes a call – there’s no need to use the Website or call into Google Voice.

Users can also check their Google Voice messages with a touch of a button. Another innovative feature is that users don’t need to pick up the phone to hear who is calling. Ooma will play the announcement and message over the phone’s speaker, thus giving the user another way besides caller ID to screen calls. All Ooma numbers can be ported over to Google Voice.

UPDATE: A few more reports from Tuesday afternoon, including one on Beta News, indicate that a network issue may have caused the outage -- however, Ooma's service provider, Internap (News - Alert), denies incurring any network problems that may have caused it.

Patrick Barnard is a contributing writer for TMCnet. To read more of Patrick’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Patrick Barnard







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