To Ooma or not Ooma

I have been thinking about dropping my home VoIP service with BrightHouse. There have only been a few times over the last 6 years where the services was less than desirable. But the main factor is the damn price. VoIP is VoIP why like other service providers do the continue to charge so much?

I have looked at spinning up my own Asterisk server, yea its all pretty straight forward but I really don't want to rely on just my skills and time. Products like Ooma on the other hand are so tempting.

I just checked the Amazon reviews and they have a huge majority of 5 star ratings. And my gmail had an offer from Ooma (direct marketing at its best) for 50% off! Now that's a bargain. If I pay $99 for the product I can port my local number for about $32. And then pay a mere $4 per month in Uncle Sam taxes.

After a few months I would have basically cut even when compared to BH. and then its just extra money in the family budget there after.

Now what about 911 and Internet outages?? Well my home security has built in cell backup. So with or without it will still call. If all cell coverage is down then we are all out of luck. And there are hot buttons on my security panel that will let the family call directly to EMS, fire and police. So I am not overly concerned.

Regular cell service is sketchy at best inside the house with both Sprint 3G and Verizon 4G. So that's just a crap shoot. Oh and there is the occasional Fax...yea still need that for work.


I really think I might go for Ooma, try their pre selected number or maybe port my Google Voice and try it for 30 days. If it sucks then I'll return it. Otherwise its bye-bye BrightHouse.

Wowza and Haivision Streaming

Producing live audio broadcasts for 3000 to 5000 listeners can be a big challenge. Shoutcast or Nicecast were good for mp3 streams with about 900 listeners. Enter Amazon, Akamai and other CDNs and you have an infrastructure to reach a larger listener ship. My challenge was limited budget and a relatively diverse environment of encoders and listening devices. With no set standard to reach all. Enter Haivision and now Wowza. It used to be Amazon and Akamai cloud encoders were leaders. But the cost was too prohibited. Haivision and Wowza now use a common engine and its simple to setup and use. Produce just a single RTMP stream and their applications have user interfaces where you type in a few URLs and click start. Within 30 seconds you can hear the stream and see the crystal clear video. The biggest challenge is multibit rate needs, multiple protocols and last mile connectivity. It appears that Akamai has this handled with additional edge servers to help 3G/4G coverage. I'm sure Level3, MirrorImage and other CDNs are following suite. 2014 brings a renewed challenge. Delivering a single RTMP stream but output it through a single transcoder. And deliver it with multibit rate support. And venue coverage of WiFi and 3G/4G will also be enhanced, so I suspect to see a few thousand more listeners each day! What challenges has live streaming brought to you?