SunRocket, Ooma, Verizon, Vodafone, at&t

So the VoIP blogging community is talking about almost nothing but Ooma this morning. But as I mentioned on my other blog (www.ipbusinessmag.com), focusing so much energy on SunRocket's travails, which was the other recent item everybody was talking about, though obviously of high interest, has almost no strategic implications for the broader communications industry. Rumors that first had Vodafone pondering buying Verizon, though almost certainly an investment banker's trial balloon, are something else.

Today Andy Abramson says his sources say it actually is at&t that is talking about buying Vodafone. Now that would be quite a deal. And while this particular rumor also could be the result of an investment banker's strategy, it does fit quite well what new at&t CEO Randall Stephenson has been saying about at&t. It is a "wireless company" that has no intentions of abandoning its grow by acquisition strategy.

Ooma is interesting. What happened to SunRocket also is a high interest event. But neither is going to have truly strategic direct implications for the global VoIP industry. Whatever one might say about the particularities of the U.S. VoIP industry, VoIP continues to grow on a global basis, almost mechanically.

Wireless increasingly is the way voice gets done. Social networking portals, instant messaging and enterprise apps also are emerging ways voice and communications gets done. All of that is a really big deal.

David Beckemeyer on Ooma

David Beckemeyer, Televolution CEO, is the one guy I think is in position to evaluate Ooma's business prospects. This is what he says: "As some may know, I have been aware of this effort and provided some early guidance for their project (VERY EARLY - I have not been involved for a LONG time).

They could have launched the idea on top of the PhoneGnome platform and been in market years ago, but they wanted to build hardware - that was a bigger driver than anything else (bigger than whether the business made any sense).

I give their stated vision/business plan no chance at all, for the exact reasons I told Ooma in 2004:

1. solving a problem (call costs) that is going away (already going to zero)

2. people won't open their wallet for a large upfront purchase, as shown by Tivo etc. and especially not for "phone stufff" which is perceived as should be cheap

3. regulatory troubles - like FON, you are asking users to violate their terms of use with their provider

4. privacy/legal/CALEA trouble - do I want to let people I don't know use my phone and get wiretapped using my number plotting their dastardly deeds?

Item 4 above is different than the Skype-like P2P in that with Ooma, you're letting people use a highly-regulated instrument, with a lot of technology and history in wiretapping (vs. my computer and encrypted sessions).

I believe they would still also have a caller-ID problem in that my calls will not be delivered with my number as the calling number, but that of the Ooma box owver who's line is making the call (or the box blocks caller ID on outgoings calls so people I know won't accept my calls because they won't see that it is me calling).

But again, we should not underestimate the impact of a lot of money and backers that probably will not have much patience. Ooma could evolve into something viable.

With the fact that PhoneGnome is now free and needs no software, basically users can get most their calls free with no investment and no hardware at all.

Ooma, PhoneGnome

Ooma hopes it can make a business in the independent VoIP space without slugging it out with incumbents, cable companies, Vonage, Packet8 and others. Ooma uses peer-to-peer technology, it reminds me of nothing so much as PhoneGnome. A user can rely on broadband and Ooma, "cutting the cord," or can keep legacy POTS and integrate Ooma with a traditional landline (the easiest way to keep 911 service). All calls within the U.S. market are free, and off-network calls are billed at Skype-like rates.

Like PhoneGnome, the revenue model is "selling boxes," not recurring revenues from services. Ooma is betting that a $400 purchase of a base hub that functions like an analog terminal adapter will appeal more than a VoIP service account. Additional Ooma adapters can be bought to add service to other analog phones on other standard wall jacks.

Perhaps the longest-lasting impact, irrespective of what happens with Ooma, is the P2P approach it uses to create a network. As with all P2P networks, each end user's client becomes a node on the network to help terminate traffic. I don't know what technology platform Ooma uses. It seems logical that Session Initiation Protocol is not what Ooma is doing on the P2P side of its platform, but it seems SIP has to be there someplace for interface to the public network at some level. But David Beckemeyer seems best placed to noodle on that.

Alec Saunders (Iotum)asks an interesting question, however. Ooma says it will try to use member POTS access to essentially avoid paying termination charges. Presumably that means invoking user phone numbers in some way. If caller ID information cannot be spoofed from the POTS phone, but only from the trunk side of the network, does that mean a user's caller ID gets delivered even when it is just a transit node between a calling party and the called party? Details are scanty at this point so I'm not sure anybody outside Oomba knows the answer.

Or maybe there isn't even a problem. Presumably Ooma would try to "terminate" a call at a local Ooma "node" and then use the Ooma P2P to retransmit the bits using the public Internet to the terminating Ooma node with no need to deliver calling number ID information.

One wonders how much longer it will be until even Tier One service providers start to take a closer look at integrating P2P in some significant way with the existing public networks, especially as those networks are upgraded for IP Multimedia Subsystem and there's more broadband in the access network.

Not P2P as an "over the top" end user application. P2P as a part of the architecture of a managed network that simply uses multiple techniques to reach deeper into the environment sitting on the other side of the traditional "network termination" point. Making customers part of the network is starting to look like good business sense.