NPR: Company to Offer Free Internet Phone Calls

Company to Offer Free Internet Phone Calls

As I've mentioned, my wife has been in Turkey for the past month. It's not her first long trip, which means I've spent a lot of money in the past on long-distance bills. Sometimes the bills could reach as high as $200 or $300.

But I've not spent a penny during this trip. Skype and SightSpeed, two Internet peer-to-peer telephony services, have saved my pocketbook. Both my wife and I have these programs installed on our computers, and we each have a Web cam. That means I get to talk to her for free as long as I want each day (working around that nasty seven-hour time difference), and I get to see her while I'm doing it.

But not everyone wants to use a computer to make phone calls. There's the more traditional-phone-service-like Voice over Internet Protocol, of course, and while you pay less, there's still a monthly fee to use services like Vonage. (Skype and SightSpeed also offer similar fee-based services.) And there are taxes as well.

But the San Francisco Chronicle's Technology Chronicles blog reports that a new company is offering a product that, after the purchase price, allows you to make as many domestic calls as you want for free. No taxes or anything. For as long as you want.

Ooma, a company from Palo Alto, Calif., has "announced a beta version of their ooma product, which allows people to make unlimited free calls from home using a broadband connection." A hub costs $399, meaning it would probably take a little more than a year for it to pay for itself based on the cost of other VoIP services. (Ooma says it will charge low per-minute rates for international calls.)

Business folks think the company is taking a bit of chance, BusinessWeek reports. Another VoIP company, SunRocket, is closing down, and Vonage is in a slump. But the people who run ooma think their product will get around problems other companies face.

1:39 PM ET | 07-20-2007 | permalink

Comments (Send a comment)

Has anyone from NPR spoken with Lisa Hook about Sunrocket closing? I think it would be great to have her on an NPR special. It should be easy to talk to her, afterall she is on the Board. I am out $160 for an annual membership that now can never be fulfilled. It would certainly be nice to know why they were still taking orders even days before shutting down.

Sent by Gabriel | 6:58 PM ET | 08-01-2007

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