Larry interviews Eric Stang, the CEO of Ooma, a company that provides internet phone services for homes and businesses using traditional or modern phones. The discussion covers the declining use and quality of conventional POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) lines and Ooma’s services, including emergency response reliability, cost-effectiveness, and additional features like call blocking and mobile app integration. They emphasize the safety benefits of land lines, especially for emergencies, children, and elderly family members.
Listen to their conversation below or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
Transcript
I’m Larry Magid, and this is Are We Doing Tech Right? A podcast from ConnectSafely, where we speak with experts from tech, education, government, and academia about tech policies, platforms, and habits that affect our daily lives. And if you like what you hear, please subscribe and visit us at ConnectSafely.org.
Larry: Here’s a sound that a lot of people probably don’t recognize.
It’s an old fashioned telephone, once connected to what we used to call a POTS line, which stood for Plain Old Telephone System. But these days, almost everybody is using a cell phone, and those are great. But there’s something to be said for those plain old telephones. For one thing, if you had an emergency, you just picked them up and called 911.
and the operator would know exactly where you’re calling from, not just your approximate location based on GPS. But regular old phones or landlines are rapidly becoming obsolete. However, there’s a company called Ooma that offers an internet phone service that can use those old fashioned phones or modern cordless phones with just about all the advantages of that old phone system plus a lot of other advantages.
At a much, much lower price. Eric Stang is the CEO of Ooma. Eric, let’s start by talking about what is the Ooma phone service?
Eric: Yeah, we, we offer phone service for both residential homes and for businesses, but for most consumers, it’s a device you can buy to put in your home, connect up to the internet, but get very reliable, traditional type phone service.
Along with special features such as blocking telemarketers, you don’t want to talk to. Having a mobile app so you can get your phone calls when you’re outside the home and other things that make the phone more convenient for you.
Larry: Yeah, as I mentioned, I had Ooma for a long time and I actually hooked it up to a regular standard desk phone that they had to Ooma lines and I had a two line phone and I had a landline also for my home use.
That was my business phone for many, many, many years. I mean, going back to before area codes. If you really want to. Go back far enough growing up and if this if you’re watching the video of this, you could actually see an old rotary phone in the corner of my ear, but most people are listening, but interestingly enough, my landline kept getting deteriorating in two ways.
Number one, it was all spam calls. But more important, I was getting static and I kept getting AT& T out to the house and they would do something and they wouldn’t fix it. I mean, they, they, I think they tried. I think the technicians were doing the best they can. And finally, I just ripped it out because the quality of service had gotten so bad.
Whereas the Oomafone continues, assuming I’ve got internet, which I, Almost always do. It continues to be quite good.
Eric: Yeah, that doesn’t surprise me. The copper line phone service has been degrading for years. In fact, they’re now even sunsetting, closing down the copper network in certain geographies in the U.
- today. So some people are forced to make the transition. One of the great things about the Ooma phone is it works like a landline. You have landline 9 1 1. You can pick it up, dial 9 1 1. You don’t even have to say a word. And the police or fire department knows where to go to come to your house and, and help you.
And you know, if you use it with our internet service, it can also work even when the internet goes out. Well, that
Larry: is mainly the reason I’m calling you. As you know, this podcast is called, Are We Doing Tech Right?, but it’s sponsored by ConnectSafely, which is an internet safety organization, and as I was talking to my colleagues in the organization, sort of justifying this is very different than what we typically do, I said, well, actually, there is a major safety story here, which I want to get to, because virtually everyone has a cell phone, and so one might ask, why would you even need something that looks and smells and acts like a landline, And of course, you also get into the question of if the internet goes down or if your power goes down, unlike the old landlines of, of yesteryear, if your power goes down and if you don’t have a battery backup or some other system your internet and your will go down with it.
I know there are solutions for that. But I also know that with 911, if I were to dial 911 for my cell phone right now, they would know my approximate location. And because I live in a single family house, they might come to my house, they might come to my neighbor’s house. But if you live in a condo or an apartment, they have no idea what unit you’re in.
Eric: Yeah, and it’s more than that. I know I called 911 once. I’ve been in a car accident. I waited for 10 minutes and they never picked up off my cell phone. It was in where I live in San Mateo County. It goes to a centralized location for the whole county. And I guess they were busy at the time. I don’t know.
Fortunately, police showed up anyway. I’ve had that same
Larry: experience on the road when I’ve seen road hazards. I call 9 1 1. Used to get the highway patrol. I’m not sure where you get anymore, but I’ve been on hold for quite a while or waiting to answer, get an answer for quite a while.
Eric: You may remember the big fire that happened in Oakland in that you know, living space and, and they called 9 1 1 when the fire broke out and they couldn’t.
They, they got routed to a location away from them and then that location referred them to a wrong location trying to figure out where they were. They actually got the fire department to come by running down the street and knocking on the door of the firehouse.
Larry: That’s a reliable way to do
Eric: it. So you know, it’s just the case that cell phone 911, they don’t know where you are.
And, and it’s not your local PSAP, we call it, point of, point of presence that, that’s getting the call. So it’s going to take time to refer you, even if they do answer and, you know, that time matters, particularly in certain situations. The FCC did a study where they said if 911 response was one minute faster in the United States.
It would save 10, 000 people a year from dying.
Larry: Well, there’s one of the other reasons why I have a Pneumofon both in my bedroom and in the downstairs area in my office is Look, cell phones are pretty reliable these days, but nothing’s 100 percent reliable, and in some disasters, of course, the cell towers could go out, the cell phone could have a dead battery.
And I hadn’t thought of this before you just mentioned that issue of the minute, making a call on a cell phone, you know, obviously it doesn’t take a long time, but sometimes you have to fiddle with the screen, wake it up, use your, put in your PIN number, get to the right app. It can take 30, 40 seconds, maybe longer in some cases, as opposed to picking up a phone and just.
Dialing three digits and you’re done.
Eric: Yeah. And you know, anybody in your house can do it. And they’re going to get the right place and that place is going to know who called. It’s a terrible story, but when they discovered, you know, Prince at his home, the people discovered him didn’t know his address.
So they called 9 1 1, I guess on a cell phone and they were running around looking for a male to find his address to tell them where they were. You know, with, with a real 9 1 1 in the home, you know, your child can pick it up and dial 9 1 1, your babysitter can do it. Anybody anybody can have instant access to response and you know, on average, I’ll tell you a fact about our service.
On average, once every nine years, our customers call 911. Think about that for a minute. I don’t know the last time you called 911. I guess it’s within the last 10 years. I’ve called it once, but my wife called it once when the kids got stuck in the banister. But you know, you do. People do use it.
Larry: Sure. I, I’ve used it.
I mean, fortunately not for anything threatened my life, but I’ve used it certainly on the road when I’ve witnessed accidents. Of course, that’s not where the market is, although theoretically possible. But the, the other thing I have adult children and my son apologized the other day because he called the house and he couldn’t recall.
I’m sorry. Excuse me. He called it. The cell phone, because he didn’t even think that we had a house when he forgot that we had an umuphone. Although, frankly, the umuphone is mostly my office. My wife doesn’t answer it. But, you know, the fact is, in the old days, when I grew up, there was a house phone. For better or worse, right?
We all shared it. When, when, when me and my sister and brother were using it, my parents, you know, were hovering around. And actually there are some safety implications there as well as well as the annoyance of having your parents listening to your phone call. But the point is that there is something to be said for having a house phone when some people, I mean, it’s different than calling an individual.
Eric: Yeah, you know, I, I, I don’t know how you do things, but I keep my phone on vibrate a lot because if I don’t have her right with me, I don’t know I’m being called my, my mom’s in her eighties and she has Ooma with phones throughout the house and it’s been a real blessing because she’s not very mobile and I can always reach her.
And you know, sometimes she forgets to call me. I ask her to call me every day just to check in. And, you know, the worst thing is when I go to call her and she doesn’t pick up, I get nervous what’s going on. And so with phones in every room, it’s easy for her to pick up the phone and say, Oh, hi, I forgot to call you, but everything’s good.
But, yeah, it’s just, it’s really nice to have the convenience of always being available throughout the house.
Larry: Speaking of, of safety, trip hazards are another safety issue and the other day I finally decided I needed to get rid of that ugly rug that I had in my bedroom whose only purpose was to cover the phone wire that goes from the wall over to my bed to, to avoid tripping over the line.
And 50, 49 or whatever it is you can buy. The Ooma Tello handset, wireless cordless handset, and completely eliminate any phone wires in your house. Not to mention the fact that the phone wires, a lot of people don’t even have phone wires in their house anymore. You can plug the, you can plug the Ooma into the old phone system wires if you want to, which is what I used to do, but I’m enjoying the fact that I now have a completely wireless flash landline type solution.
Eric: Yeah, indeed. You can you know, one of the neat things about with Ooma too is we’re talking about convenience and safety with 911 and, and and having phones in the home, but our service prices started free. Just pay taxes and fees. So it’s amazing. It’s not spending much to have hardware. It’s not that much safety.
You do have to buy the hardware. And as you said, if you buy the, the the satellite phones that work wirelessly, you can put them anywhere in a convenient spot and not worry about all the, all the, all the trouble of, of cords and things. And that’s what most of our customers do. And they just, they just set the phone in a corner and they’ve got it when they need it.
I was surprised.
Larry: I live in a pretty big house and it actually got from my office downstairs all the way up to my bedroom, which is way on the other side of the house and up a story and it works just great. In fact, You know, better quality than the landline I had. So what I’ve done, because I want the most safe possible situation, is I bought a, it’s not a universal power supply, but it’s one of these big batteries that is enough to keep a refrigerator going for several hours.
And I’ve got that in my office and I have my. Internet modem. I have a AT& T. It’s called a gateway, but I’m using it as a modem. I have my router, which is separate. And then I have my Ooma device plugged into that. And so that if the power to go out were to go out, I would have hours, probably days worth of internet service and Ooma service.
And then upstairs and in my office, I’m using the wireless Phones which have batteries. So I assume you’ve got several long many hours of standby there. So that’s my way of saying Okay, the power goes out. I’m still fine What what are some other what’s your thought about that issue?
Eric: I think that’s very forward thinking to to have put all that together.
For our customers who don’t want to Power other things we offer a version of our of our solution. We call it The tele LTE LTE for wireless service, and you can it comes with battery backup and its own internet, you know, back to us so that you can have one device and it’s going to operate no matter what the power does.
And as you said, with the, with the phones, either hard connected into it, or our satellite phones that have batteries. You’re, you’re, you’re, you’re good, even if the power goes out. And a lot of people like that solution just for the ultimate in security, I guess.
Larry: Yeah. Does it also, if, assuming you do, everything’s fine, you got power, you’ve got your own internet, can you hook it up to your own internet, your own power supply and, or do you, or do you have to use ELT for all your calls?
Eric: You, it’s flexible. You can, you can hook it up to your own internet instead. You can hook it up to your own battery backup instead. But it’s one contained unit that that comes with its own internet and battery backup. Just in case you, you want to use what was put together for you. Which is
Larry: another, another redundancy if your internet fails, unless you’re on the same service and they, I don’t know what service you guys use, but
Eric: we, we, we most often, well, we use a couple of different services.
We, we will, it depends a little bit on your location and which service is going to be best for you, but often we’re using the T Mobile network.
Larry: Yeah. So if you have Verizon and That’s down, and if T Mobile isn’t, you’re, you’re still okay. And what are some of the other reasons that people might want to use your service?
Eric: Another which I found very valuable, I don’t like giving my cell phone out to everybody. Everybody asks me for it. And I, you know, I like to control how many calls I get, because I’m always getting interrupted by the thing. And so I often give my home phone number and I rely on the Ooma mobile app.
So I don’t have to be at home to get the phone call. The Ooma mobile app will ring on my phone with my home phone number. But in this case, I can see. It’s it’s the mobile app being used, and I can screen the colors more easily or do things like that, or just turn the app off if I don’t want it, but it’s nice having a separate phone number for the home versus me personally, because then, you know, I’m not getting bothered by by a lot of things that, you know, are more.
I only want to deal with when I’m at home.
Larry: And also, that means that when you’re away from home, in a sense, your home phone will follow you, will follow you because it will ring through the mobile app and you can still answer your home phone if you choose to.
Eric: It does mean that, and a lot of stay at home parents love that because they’re out and about all day with the kids.
But, you know, they, they, they, they don’t miss that call when it comes in you know, with deliveries and with a workman coming to your home and other things, the, the, the drugstore calling up to say your prescriptions ready to get all these phone calls while you won’t miss them. If you’ve got a mobile app and if it’s a doctor’s
Larry: office, you’ll never be able to get back to them.
So sometimes you got to take a look. And well, what I do is I have one phone number I give out, it happened to be a Google voice number. And one of the things I love about Ooma. Is that I was able to configure it so that the caller ID that I’m putting out there is my Google voice number. So I, most people, I don’t even know what my, my cellular number is.
And most people don’t know it because Google voice, of course, will ring anything. But also if I make a call from home, it will give out that Google voice number as well, which is I, I choose that. That’s what I wanted to do.
Eric: Yeah, you can, you can, you know, one of the nice things when you move to an internet phone solution like Ooma is it’s very configurable.
You can, you can set the caller ID you want to have. You can have it ring in different ways. You can have it set up so it doesn’t ring at certain hours of the day. Or, or only rings with numbers that you’ve whitelisted. So if it’s one of my family members, it’s going to ring between midnight and 7am. But all other calls, it’s not going to ring.
There’s all kinds of nice little features you can do. And you can set that stuff up on our on our web app. And it’s all just sort of, you know, paint by numbers simple, and you can just select what you want it to do.
Larry: Now, it’s been a very long time since I’ve made a long distance call on the AT& T landline network, so I have no idea what it costs.
But back in the day, it was not cheap. Even calling from Palo Alto to San Francisco, which is 30 miles, cost, I don’t know, 20 cents a minute or something. Ooma, as I recall, has pretty good rates on international, of course domestic calls are free. But your international rates, I think, are pretty low, as I recall.
Eric: They’re extremely low. In fact one of our biggest calling destinations with our customers is India because we, we offer very low rates there as well as many other countries. I, you know, I ran into this the hard way a month or two ago, I was planning an overseas trip and I need to make a couple of phone calls to hotels that didn’t do my.
Online entry, right? And I got a bill that was like 50 bucks. One phone call on my cell phone. I believe I was shocked. And then I thought to myself, here I am an omen. I didn’t even use my my own long distance. But, you know, that probably would have been pennies. Or, you know, less than a dollar on, on Ooma’s international call.
I call
Larry: London a lot and I think it’s like a cent a minute. It’s essentially nothing or very little. I can’t remember exactly what it is. I have taken my Oomatilla with me overseas back in the day before AT& T offered a 12 a day international plan, which is still a lot of money. If you’re traveling for a lot of time, but I remember when it would cost many, many dollars to make even a short call from anywhere in Europe, back to the U S and the telework just fine.
Assuming I could get an internet connection. Is that a use case? Is it legal? I, I did it. I hope I’m not confessing to a crime here.
Eric: You’re not, you’re not, you know, I can tell you a lot of our customers do it. We have our customers in almost every country of the world today. This goes back in time, but we even had a U.
- Embassy using it makes you can be anywhere in the world and call the U. S. for free, and they and someone in the U. S. can call you like they’re calling another U. S. number,
Larry: right?
Eric: So and that that works great. If you have the tell a box and you take it with you, but it also works with the mobile app. So You know, if you think if you’re going to be out of the country and you want, you know, want to stay connected, it’s a, it’s, it’s a essentially a, it’s, it’s, it’s as free as calling anywhere else in the United States.
And that’s that’s a really nice capability. Tell you a small story. We discovered when we went public that we actually had a couple of our Oomatillo boxes in North Korea. Which we didn’t want to have, and we didn’t know they were there until we discovered it. We, of course, had to shut them off because that’s, that’s illegal.
Right. But that just showed you how far the Oomatillo has spread. Around the world.
Larry: That’s amazing.
Eric: It’s really, really
Larry: something. I’ve even had internet to hook up the tello too, but I’m sure that was a government installation that was
Eric: using them. I don’t know. We don’t know who it was. We just know we, we had, we had our, our, our product there.
You know, you can go to the center of Africa and, and we, we used to have a map. I haven’t seen it lately. I had an online map on a, on a computer screen here that showed all the different tellos around the world. And almost every country, even the center of Africa, just places you would never think. Had had our product in them because, you know, for just a few dollars a month, you’ve got complete phone service and a lot of optionality and flexibility.
It’s, it’s really the, the least expensive way as well to, to connect these days.
Larry: Yeah, my only warning is if you take it to a crazy time zone, that you make sure you put on the do not disturb. So people, you don’t get routine phone calls in the middle of your night. That was one problem I had. When I, when I was, I think I used it in Paris or somewhere, Oh my God, the phone’s ringing off the hook and they think it’s daytime.
Eric: There is a button on the unit that you can push for do not disturb, but yes, it’s important to remember that.
Larry: And of course you also have voicemail,
Eric: not that anybody uses that anymore. Well, we do, but we also send your voicemail to your email. Yes. So you can, you can read it, scan it. Nice, nice little, nice little feature too.
It’s amazing how many Oomatellos phone service we sell every quarter through mass retailers today. 10 years ago, people were talking about the home phone going away. And, and I think even today, there’s 30, 40 million landlines in North America. And we sell a surprising number of Tellos every year still.
And it’s been a great product for us. We’re ranked number one by Consumer Reports, too, which has been a really nice Advantage for us,
Larry: and then, of course, a lot of businesses largely still do use something that looks like a landline. They call them pox lines, plain old telephone service. It’s the official name of a regular landline, but businesses need regular phones as well.
Often,
Eric: well, in fact we have two solutions in that space. We have what we believe is the best solution for smaller size businesses. Think, you know, Main Street businesses, doctor’s office insurance agent. Lawyer, you know, auto repair store restaurant. We have hundreds of thousands of users today on our small business solution.
And then along with it, we have a dedicated solution for pots lines that are, as you say, that are going away for businesses, we call that Ooma air dial. And, you know, you’ve probably never thought about it, but how does your elevator phone work? Or your door entry system, or your fire alarm panel in your building.
All of those have copper lines, and the copper lines have gotten very expensive, sometimes well over a hundred dollars a month. And we can drop in our solution to replace the copper line and keep the equipment going. And it’s been a great growth driver for us as a company. And it’s, you know, it’s funny, it’s a natural extension of what we did so long ago for the home phone service.
We’ve taken the equipment up a level and what it can do and put it now into, into the business setting. And it’s been going great for us.
Larry: And of course, a lot of people run businesses from home as well, so in that case, it could be very handy. And I’m trying to remember whether there’s a solution for, tell me if there is, and I may be getting you mixed up with something else, like groups, like, let’s say, ConnectSafely.
We have several employees from around the country. Is there a way we could have one phone number that could reach our entire staff who may be scattered around the country?
Eric: Absolutely. We you know, some people will set it up that way, but it’s called multi ring ring everybody at once. Some people set it up with kind of, we call it, find me, follow me.
It’ll ring one. And then when that doesn’t work, it’ll ring the next and then it’ll ring the next. You can really have configure it any, any, any way you like.
Larry: I’m going to have to reach with every one of your employees and finally get to you. They called me,
Eric: well, I hope they can get to me because, you know, part of my job as CEO here is to make sure.
I know what’s going on in the company and people feel connected. But yeah people ring me all the time.
Larry: Okay. I’ll remember that the next time I have any problems with a phone or your tech support, I’ll give you a call. No, you actually, I have called your tech support department and they’re quite good.
I was surprised because I always expect it to be horrible when I call tech
Eric: support. Well, it’s hard to do tech support really well every time, but I will tell you. It’s an area that we focus on. ’cause we care. One of our values, we have six values in the, one of the values is in fact the first value is we care about our customer.
Mm-hmm . And we’ll do whatever it takes to have our customers that we have today working well and happy. And that comes first before trying to get the next customer or do the next new thing if have to, I’ll give a customer my cell phone number and, and until they get resolved with, with the need they have.
It’s just not those that we’ve tried to build the company on. I found the best way to market yourself and build a great company is to serve the customers. You have really well and let them tell their friends
Larry: and we got to wrap up. I just want to review some of the safety issues. So we’re talking about, first of all, redundancy.
Your cell phone’s great, but. For a lot of reasons, something could go wrong with it. Second, we’re talking about simplicity, like especially calling 911, pick up the receiver, press three buttons, you’re there, they know your exact address. We talked about battery backup, that there, you can either get your own battery backup, like I have, or you could purchase your system, which has a complete battery backup that also has an internet backup as well, so that if all of your wires suddenly got cut, you still have phone service.
So and I think it is something that people ought to consider. As a way of being more safe and secure. And again, we also talked about elderly family members who A, may not want to deal with the complexity of a cell phone. And B, you might want to be able to just have the convenience of having phones around the house.
They only have one phone. I know there are many times I don’t have my phone with me at the house, where there are scat, phones scattered around my house that just always sit there waiting, hopefully not to be used for an emergency, but they are there for that purpose if necessary.
Eric: Yeah, I think you hit it well.
Safety and convenience at a very low price. Also great for young kids in the home. Yep. You know, it’s fun for kids, you know, first grade, second grade, third grade, call their grandmother, talk to someone, but, you know, call 911 if they have to, but you’re not going to give them a cell phone.
Larry: Well, that’s an interesting point, because one of the things we talk about is, you know, not wanting to give a kid a cell phone too early, because especially modern phones, of course, you can get them a feature phone, but very few people do that.
If you want them to just be able to make a call from home a traditional phone. It works. It’s what I used when I was a kid.
Eric: Yeah, I can tell you with having gone through my own kids growing up with my latest, my youngest now, a senior in high school, it is scary what happens when you hand a kid a cell phone.
We postponed it as long as we could. I think our child was the last one in school to get their cell phone. But still it’s, it’s, it’s hard to monitor. You don’t know who they’re connecting with. We’ve had some issues. That’s why
Larry: there’s ConnectSafely. We have guides to all sorts of things, including all of the popular apps your kids use and just cell phone etiquette, but you’re absolutely right.
I mean, you can get filtered phones, but at the end of the day, a cell phone is a very powerful computer that you can use to go anywhere. And also, unlike a computer, it knows exactly where you are, and if you’re not careful, so might people who you don’t want to know where you are. So I absolutely agree that there’s reasons why for young children.
You might want to very much just go with a traditional old fashioned telephone. And the other difference between today and when I was a kid is that my parents moved to L. A. from New York. And when they wanted to call my aunt and uncle in Brooklyn, they had to wait till Sunday when the rates went down to under a dollar a minute.
And even then, they had to get off the phone pretty quickly because at a dollar a minute in the 1960s was a lot of money. Yeah. Not that cheap today either.
Eric: No, that’s a lot of money. I know. It’s just amazing. It
Larry: kind of, this is the side, it amazes me, you know, that talking on the phone is not as popular as it once was just at the point where it’s finally free.
You know, because I remember having to really budget my phone time when I, when I was young, even in my 20s, I’m old enough to remember when I, how excited I was when Sprint and MCI came along and they got it down to about 18 cents a minute. And that seemed like such a great deal to me.
Eric: Yeah. I remember those days too.
I’m, I’m with you. I can tell you, I’ve got two kids in college now and we call them, we talk to them and it’s important to have that voice connection, I think. We don’t just email back and forth or text back and
Larry: forth. And you don’t Zoom, not every call has to be a Zoom meeting or a FaceTime meeting.
Sometimes you just want to talk. Yeah. You know, just check in. Yeah.
Eric: Like I said, I check in with my elderly mom every day. Good for you. You’re welcome. Yeah, it’s nice actually.
Larry: What my kids do in a few years when I’m elderly. Eric Stang, CEO of Ooma, thanks so much for taking the time.
Eric: Oh, it’s my pleasure.
It’s great to see you again, Larry. Really appreciate it. Thanks so much.
Are We Doing Tech Right is produced by Christopher Le. Maureen Kochan is the executive producer. Theme music by Will Magid. I’m Larry Magid..