Startup Offers Free Telephone Calls
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A new startup wants you to think of phone-calling fees as a one-time device purchase, not as an ongoing, monthly rate. The company, fashionably avoiding a capitalized first letter, is called ooma. It announced Thursday that, once you buy its $399 phone, you can make unlimited free calls for the life of the device.
With ooma's phone, users can make as many domestic U.S. calls as they like to VoIP , landline, or wireless phones. International calls have rates comparable to Skype's, which are very low-cost. By contrast, Vonage offers VoIP domestic U.S. calls for a low monthly rate, and Skype charges extra for calls to and from regular phones.
Much like Skype, the ooma service relies on peer-to-peer technology in that other connected oomas route calls over the Internet. This means that ooma-ites need to have a broadband connection. To get the user base sizeable, several free ooma phones will be sent out later this summer in a beta program the company is calling White Rabbit. Each of the initial ooma recipients will be able to invite three friends to get ooma-ized.
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