Before you call Betamax a scam, read the Terms of Service!

In the last weeks I received many messages from people who want to start a lawsuit against the VoIP company Betamax from Cologne, Germany. They feel betrayed by the mothership of Voipstunt, Voipcheap, Sparvoip, Lowratevoip, Nonoh and other offers. Something must have gone wrong with their billing or they believe that Betamax wrongfully charged too much. Aside from the problem that Betamax themselves are apparently victim of a scam, I can only say that for me everything works flawlessly. But I get the impression that many users don't understand the company's Terms of Service. This morning a Betamax user called Robert wrote:

The company I work for happens to be in Moscow so I call them regularly. Why do they suddenly want to charge me for these calls? It doesn't make any difference whether I call the U.S.A., Italy or Russia. They are all free and perhaps I call Moscow three times a day but perhaps twice a week.

I told him to first look at the website http://backsla.sh/betamax. There you can always see the latest prices and you will realize that with most Betamax companies you can call Russia's landline phones for free, within a Fair Use Policy (FUP) of 300 minutes per week. This FUP seems very fair to me. I never exceed it, so Betamax' normally works like a flatrate for me.

In fact I am very surprised about their cheap prices for Russia, because I know that connections outside of St. Petersburg and Moscow are very expensive to buy in wholesale markets. Therefore e. g. Rebtel users have to pay $0.019 Cents to Moscow and St. Petersburg landlines - but $0.079 Cents to other Russian cities. So Betamax' $0.00 Cent is a great bargain. For the German company it makes a big price difference whether they terminate calls in the U.S.A., Italy or in Russia. Although it might be difficult to explain to the average user like Robert.

Now I see that calls, which were originally free, are now being charged under the 'fair use policy'. This I don't understand.

There can be two reasons for that:

1.) Robert calls for more then 300 minutes per week.

2.) He shares his IP number with other users, so that Betamax thinks that it's only one user. That's what happened at Voxalot, a virtual internet PBX: All Voxalot users had the same IP number to Betamax. Therefore they jointly exceeded the FUP very fast. Voxalot managed to strike an agreement with Betamax to pass the original IP number, so that every user now has his own FUP.

So, if Betamax charges for actual free calls, there might be a technical problem. Otherwise it seems a great bargain to me to get 1.200 minutes per month from Betamax for just €2.50. (Taking into account that that you have to pay €10 every four months to get the €0.00 to Russian landlines.) People should also consider what user satphoneguy wrote in Voxalot's forum:

having lived in many parts of the world I think that a lot of what is happening is relate to cultural differences and expectation of customer service. from what i have read the vast majority of complaints are coming from the USA. here in the USA it is somewhat expected that if you are unhappy with a service or feel deceived by misleading marketing that you should be eligible for refund on what you spent. most American companies do indeed give 100% refunds to their customers no questions asked when they complain. i do know from having lived overseas that is not the business etiquette everyplace. there are a number of reasons why many people may feel deceived since the betamax 'fair use policies' are not very clear. in particular concerning additional charges for use of SIP devices on some services. it is all exasperated in that americans also feel that every company should have a customer service line where they can call with questions(or complaints) or at very least email support with a quick turnaround to response(same day)

i do have to say though that it seems many people who complain about numerous betamax companies continue to try the others. this is very similar to what i dealt with working for a very large retail company - some of the biggest complainers and returners of products for refunds were also some of the biggest shoppers; i would see them on nearly a daily basis.

i personally have never had a billing issue with betamax. although in recent months my only funded account is nonoh; since the rates are so much less for the mobile destinations that i call than with any of the SIP options and i have unlimited calls to NA and most landlines through another provider.

Many people in Europe accept a lousy service, as long as it's cheap. But others expect a great service although they pay nearly nothing. That's just not possible to deliver for a company. Good service always has its price, especially in a country with sky-high wages like Germany. People who want more than just plain phone minutes should subscribe to companies like PhoneGnome, Packet8 or Sipgate which have real hotlines by phone and email for their clients. That's what I also told Robert, who finally admitted:

I suppose, like most people, I never fully read the 'Terms of Use', although in these terms there is no exact reason mentioned and more than that, there is no exact time limit per country or city mentioned where this might be relatively easy as an adder to the price information.

Please always have a look at the small print at the end of every Betamax web page!

* Max 300 minutes per week of free calls, measured over the last 7 days and per unique IP address. Unused free minutes cannot be taken to the following week(s). If limit is exceeded the normal rates apply. With your FREE DAYS you can call for free to all the destinations listed as free! When you have no FREE DAYS left the normal rates apply. You can get extra Freedays by buying credit

They say it very clear that free calls are limited to 300 minutes per week and IP address. That's not too difficult to understand, isn't it? What still remains a mistery to me, is the sentence „When you have no FREE DAYS left the normal rates apply“.

What are these normal rates after 300 minutes? I couldn't find them either.

Why there never will be a hosted-Skype-to-SIP

Phonegnome's David Beckemeyer has a great post, explaining why my dream of a "hosted-Skype-to-SIP" will not come true, as long as Skype doesn't publish its interface.

So don't blame the operators and service providers - blame the cause of the situation SKYPE! Skype needs to provide "data center" solutions if you expect more operators and service providers to deploy "hosted Skype" services.

Thanks for explaining how many hacks are necessary at Fring and Mobivox to build bridges to Skype. And please don't try to call me on Skype! I am most probably not connected.

Read David's post.

Ringfree brings VoIP callthrough with every provider to the iPhone

In the last weeks I was displeased with the state of VoIP on mobile handsets. Wifi coverage is spotty and callback services like Jajah require two phone calls at the same time, which makes them too expensive for penny pinchers like me. That's why I am a fan of callthrough applications which involve only one call leg. The call goes to a local number where a server converts it into a VoIP call. But unfortunately this needs numerous key strokes in addition to the destination number and makes callthrough a cumbersome activity.

Software like MobileTalk from Packet8 would help, but it is bound to just one VoIP provider and could be done much better. Unfortunately the underlying software from Mobilemax gets distributed only to companies and not to end users. So people have to wait until their VoIP provider of choice implements it.

But salvation is near, at least for iPhone users: RingFree let's you use every VoIP provider or even your own Asterisk / SIP server for outbound calls on Apple's "Invention of the year 2007" (according to Time Magazine). iPhone Atlas has the story:

Here, in a nutshell, is how the app works: A user registers with RingFree, entering his iPhone number and providing some other information. The user is then prompted to call a country-local number to confirm their information by entering a PIN. Once logged into the site, the user selects from a list of pre-defined VoIP providers (including VoicePulse, Gizmo Project, PhoneGnome and others) or defines his own by entering a proxy address, username and password.

After selecting or defining a provider, the user can access the Web app’s keypad, which looks something like the iPhone’s standard dialer, selects the preferred VoIP provider from a menu, and hits “Call.” The call sends a bit of JavaScript over EDGE to retrieve a local number from the VoIP provider, which the user is prompted to dial with the iPhone’s native phone application. When this number is dialed, the VoIP provider is triggered to dial the number entered in the Web app, and the call goes through.

RingFree is basically a website with a virtual dialer. It is linked to VoIP providers of choice and uses standard voice minutes to make VoIP calls. Therefore it doesn’t require any hacking or jailbreaking, nor does it require the presence of a WiFi network. Only a small amount of data is transferred over the EDGE network to signalize the call. The voice quality is reportedly good, and calls go through without too much delay so that a commentator at IntoMobile states:

Thank you for this. This is the most useful iPhone application yet. I set it up in less than 2 minutes and I made a call to Ireland using Gizmo Project. Sweet and simple. I am happy and would be jumping up and down with joy if it let me call Skypers.

That's exactly what I was looking for. RingFree is free in the first month, then it costs $30/year. You can also call Google Talk, Yahoo or MSN contacts from the iPhone. I wonder when someone will launch a similar service for other platforms, such as Symbian. It could be a great new feature for Voxalot, whose mobile callback I often use with my own VoIP providers. It costs €0.01 of data or less to establish the call, but still it demands two simultaneous phone calls.

Andy Abramson the Citizen Kane of VoIP?

I always wondered about the power of Comunicano. That's the marketing communications company of Andy Abramson, one of the most intesting bloggers in the VoIP industry. From some of his blog posts I already had gotten the vague feeling that he must be some kind of mastermind.

Many of my blog posts lead back to information that Comunicano spread. But I could realize that only recently, because Comunicano's website is nearly empty. No press releases, no list of clients - while Andy, the company's founder and head, is one of the most influential bloggers in the VoIP industry.

Some weeks ago I wrote how I feel about this situation:

Especially the VoIP area, which became a main focus of this blog, is dominated by blogs of entrepreneurs who have an interest in maximizing their profits. Luca, Andy, David, Alec, Pat and others run great websites, but there you will hardly find tipps on how to hack their companies' services for free phone calls. They use their blog as a business tool.

Today I realized that my blog is full of Comunicano's clients: Covad, Entriq, IntelePeer, iotum, Junction Networks, Mobivox, Nokia, PhoneGnome, SightSpeed, TalkPlus, Thomas Howe, Truphone, Voxalot and Vringo. Comunicano has set up a blog with their latest press releases and finally published their list of clients.

Thank you for this disclosure, Andy. I feel better now. It helps me to judge the posts on your blog which often are starting points for my own articles. I would have written these texts anyway because the topics were interesting. But it's always better to know precisely who is feeding you an information.

Also now it's easier to get first hand information about these companies without delay. Kudos to Comunicano for interesting and not annoying press relations so far!

I appreciate openness.

PhoneGnome's Mr. Blog doesn't want to write about VoIP anymore

Mr. Blog, PhoneGnome's CEO David Beckemeyer, says he considers to stop writing about VoIP because I called his blog a business tool.

Markus Göbel says this blog is a business tool. That means I have failed. I have let too much from that world creep over to this world.

Sorry everybody. I guess this means I have to blog less about VoIP, or anything related to ventures I'm involved in. Perhaps I shouldn't talk about VoIP here at all.

Please stop him from doing that! Leave a comment on his blog post and tell him that he should go on. I like his VoIP posts in this private blog very much. He makes us think when he says that Jaxtr math doesn't add up or that the Ooma business model could be considered a Toll Fraud. These are brilliant thoughts and he brought them up first. I don't want him to stop that.

Of course he also encouraged his readers to leave PhoneGnome favourable comments under an article from FierceVoIP. That's OK! It was only self defense against the Ooma fanboys who were dissing the PhoneGnome there. In this case he used his private blog as a business tool, something I would never criticize at an entrepreneur.

PhoneGnome does the same like Ooma: free P2P phone calls to PSTN. Toll Fraud?

Do you remember PhoneGnome's "Build Your Own Ooma" challenge which they started at July 19th, 2007?

We invite any company that sees promise in Ooma’s recently announced “peer to peer” VoIP model to consider rolling such a service out on the PhoneGnome platform and see how it flies.

It seems that they have succeeded, as you can tell from the latest post in the PhoneGnome blog. The company does not declare a winner of the challenge, so they probably developed the new "Directed Calling / Remote POTS Access" feature of PhoneGnome by themselves. It resembles quite exactly what Ooma already does:

This feature enables remote access to your POTS phone service (the telephone service connected to the PhoneGnome box LINE port). A user with the PhoneGnome box can grant access to other PhoneGnome accounts. Such an authorized user can then use their PhoneGnome account to direct a call to a specific POTS telephone service.

With the new Directed Calling / Remote POTS Access feature, friends and family members in one area can place calls to local numbers in another area. One PhoneGnome box can serve any number of accounts whether those accounts have the PhoneGnome box or not.

That's also the Ooma model: Phone calls are delivered over the internet and terminated for free to the PSTN over an Ooma or PhoneGnome box, since people in the US usually have free local calls. But other than Ooma the PhoneGnome feature can also work internationally. If I had a PhoneGnome at home I could directly allow other users to make free calls to Germany by sharing my phone line. Ooma restricts its free calls only to the USA.

Another big difference is that with PhoneGnome you know at least who is sharing your phone line, while Ooma just accomplishes other people's phone calls over your fixed phone line whithout even telling you. You can find the implications of this in my former blog post "Why Ooma is a security risk". In contrast the "Directed Calling / Remote POTS Access" feature of PhoneGnome adds a sumbenu called "PhoneGnome Users Permitted to Use your Phone Line". That gives a sense of security if people grant that permission only to friends and family members. But I guess that we will soon hear about PhoneGnome users who grant free calls to anyone unknown who gives them free calls in his area in exchange. One PhoneGnome box can serve any number of accounts and so it's theoretically possible to build a network for worldwide free phone calls. Yet there are PhoneGnome users in over 100 countries.

So it seems that the PhoneGnome is now slightly ahead in the funny feature fight with Ooma.

But what about the Toll Fraud?

Only one month ago PhoneGnome's CEO David Beckemeyer reasoned in his blog and in a conversation with The VoIP weblog that the way Ooma operates could be construed as Toll Fraud, or at the very least, against the terms of service of your phone company. He quoted an AT&T web page that says:

You would never allow a stranger to walk into your place of business and walk off with your company’s products or services. And yet, an individual who perpetrates toll fraud on an unsuspecting business is doing just that.

Simply put, remote toll fraud is the fraudulent, illegal use of a company’s telecommunications system by a third party from a remote location.

Very diplomatically he concluded in his blog post that it was "probably just a coincidence that we receive this notice at the same time that Ooma is launching a service that permits strangers remote access to one's telecommunications system (specifically our AT&T landline)".

Now the PhoneGnome does the same.

PhoneGnome's answer to Ooma's comparison

After the Funny fight between Ooma and PhoneGnome on FierceVoIP don't forget to read today the answer from PhoneGnome's CEO David Beckemeyer!

Last week an interview with Andrew Frame, founder and CEO of Ooma, caused furor among the PhoneGnome users when he answered the question "How is ooma different from PhoneGnome, aside from the physical aspect?". David Beckemeyer immediately demanded his right to answer and comes up with this comparison:

The key distinguishing aspects of the two products, as we see it, are:

Ooma:
- Prepay for hardware plus a bundle of services/features up front
- Service options defined by ooma
- Proprietary, closed, architecture
- Available to users in the United States
- International calls at ooma rates

PhoneGnome:
- A la carte model, with lower up-front costs
- Customers pay less up front and pay for the services/features they want
- Open, expandable and interconnects with other VoIP services/systems
- Embraces open-standards, interoperability, and industry standards
- Available to users anywhere in the world
- Free software extends PhoneGnome-enabled service to a PC or mobile phone
- PhoneGnome box works with VoIP, cable and landline phone service
- Compatible with a variety of international and domestic plans

Also we learn from the article what a tiny company stands behind the PhoneGnome. "We are a typical early stage startup, running very lean and mean. We don't have any Hollywood actors and we don't have a big pile of VC cash to burn", says Beckemeyer with a side blow to Ooma's Ashton Kutcher. They have only ten people working full time and "many terrific folks who work with us, outsourced and under other arrangements to allow us to operate without large capital requirements as we strive to expand and grow organically".

Too sad that Beckemeyer didn't tell the actual status of PhoneGnome's “Build Your Own Ooma” challenge where they try to roll out a similar peer-to-peer service on the PhoneGnome platform.

Funny fight between Ooma and PhoneGnome on FierceVoIP

FierceVoIP has an interview with Andrew Frame, founder and CEO of Ooma. We can learn something, but it's mostly PR blabla for Ooma. Much more interesting are, again, the comments to this article.

Maybe Andrew shouldn't have answered the question "How is ooma different from PhoneGnome, aside from the physical aspect?". It causes an outrage of devoted PhoneGnome users, calling his answer "completely misleading" and presuming that he didn't understand how PhoneGnome works.

In steps Dennis Peng, director product management at Ooma, making an even more comprehensive comparation of the two devices. He asserts that PhoneGnome doesn't have two phone lines, like Ooma does, but just "one and a half". What does that mean? Maybe a half phone line is shorter than a full line? Peng gets it worse from the next commentator who says "Dennis, with all due respect to your position at Ooma, you need to do a little more homework", before he strips down his argumentation.

Too sad that most comments are anonymous, because they give pretty much insight and are funny to read. I hope that Mr. Blog himself, PhoneGnome's CEO David Beckemeyer, will find this article soon and also leave a comment.

I was personally shocked to read that poor Americans pay $65-70 monthly just to get two phone lines from AT&T and PhoneGnome. With the necessary broadband connection it sums up to $100 every month.

I just pay $40 monthly for broadband and VoIP, of course having two phones lines. Two people can call my Sipgate number at the same time. If the first phone is already in use the other rings. Also twofold dial out is possible. Betamax' SparVoIP allows this without hassle, using my Sipgate number as caller ID and letting me call my favourite countries for free for just $3 per month. On top of that I can use 10 different VoIP providers on my Fritz!Box, having lots of inbound numbers from different countries and arbitrating for the best price on outgoing calls. At Voxalot I can install 30 more providers.

I can switch easily if one provider goes belly up or messes with their rates, without getting a new box or changing anything hardware-wise. Ooma guarantees only three years of free service and nobody knows what happens to the box if they go bankrupt.


UPDATE:

David Beckemeyer, designer and proprietor of PhoneGnome, aka "Mr. Blog," aka former chief technology officer and co-founder of EarthLink, has officially requested the opportunity to respond to Andrew Frame's comparison of Ooma and PhoneGnome.

You can read more about that in today's FierceVoIP article "ooma versus PhoneGnome". But his response will not be featured untile the Monday, Sept. 10 edition of FierceVoIP.

Too sad we have to wait so long.

My apologies to David Beckemeyer from PhoneGnome

In one of my last posts, "Why isn't the US the "land of the free" also in VoIP?", I critized US American VoIP companies that normally lock their ATAs to just one provider. I also mentioned PhoneGnome, but that was a little bit unfair since they are a real example of openness on the market. Their box does exactly what I want from an ATA: Be open for other providers too. CEO David Beckemeyer explains it in a comment on GigaOM:

Users of the PhoneGnome box can select ANY third-party SIP-based provider for call termination (in response to Fritz!box comment). We offer a number of plans from our partners, but users do not have to use them. See ‘Bring Your Own Provider’ option on this page: http://www.phonegnome.com/minutes.html and also, we have promoted open and interoperable as a cornerstone of our philosophy, so it comments tossing PhoneGnome in with all the closed services out there is a tad annoying: http://www.phonegnome.com/open.html

David also gave a good explanation of "free on net calls", just to show afterwards that PhoneGnome has something even better:

With a service like Free world dialup (FWD) or Skype, it means I can call another FWD user using FWD, but I dial a weird FWD number (not their normal number) and the call rings to their FWD “bat phone” or PC (not their regular phone).

In comparation PhoneGnome provided when introduced in 2005 and continues to provide a unique version of on-net calls:

1. I dial the person’s real phone number
2. The call rings to the person’s regular phone (fixed or mobile)
3. I pay NO monthly fees

So PhoneGnome seems to store normal PSTN numbers in their system to reach them for free by VoIP, similar to what Fonality does with its new trixnet service for free VoIP calls.

Sorry, David Beckemeyer, you seem to be one of the good guys in the industry who really embraces the openness of the SIP standard for VoIP. It was wrong to choose PhoneGnome as a negative example of how VoIP companies use the feature of "free calls between their members" in their marketing message. I should have chosen another company which really doesn't any offer more and uses closed ATAs.

As long as there is no flatrate for worldwide free calls we need the ability to tinker with many VoIP providers in one ATA. Luca already made the call "Let’s give up on the PSTN", and said "if any broadband owner became a FWD member, the dream of PSTN-free communication could quickly become reality". Yes, if all broadband owners would listen to Luca and use the same VoIP provider, FWD, then we needed for phone calls only our "weird FWD number", as David calls it.

All phone calls would be free on net calls. No need to install several providers in one ATA.

Why isn't the US the "land of the free" also in VoIP?

I don’t understand the US American market of VoIP devices. The PhoneBoy tells terrible things in the VoIP Weblog:

It seems that the VoIP providers are just as bad--or worse--than the mobile phone carriers in the United States, which generally don't let you take your phone to a competing provider. Unlike with US mobile phones, where there are two standards, pretty much all customer premises VoIP hardware speaks SIP, the lingua franca of VoIP. Just recently, I threw a Vonage-locked Linksys ATA/Router combo that Vonage refused to unlock for me. What a waste!

And Garrett Smith explains "How to Unlock SunRocket Gizmo For Use With InPhonex".

"Poor Americans", must I say. Why do they accept ATAs that are locked to just one provider? Because they don't know it better from their mobile telephony? Why do Vonage or Sunrocket users have to throw away their hardware and cannot simply use it with another company? Why doesn’t PhoneGnome admit that “Free calls between PhoneGnome members” is a normal feature that is available with every other VoIP provider. It’s called "on net calls" and nothing special.

In Germany we use open devices, such as Fritz!Box, where you can install up to 10 VoIP providers of your choice. One of them can be PhoneGnome, because it also supports the open SIP standard, but it doesn't have to be the only one.

With intelligent ATA dial plans you can assure to make only free on net calls and to always use the cheapest provider for your other calls. People use to play around with the cheapest routes of the various Betamax brands, depending on where they are calling to, and they like to install several of them at the same time.

In the USA, in contrast, VoIP devices are commonly locked to just one provider. Like cell phones that you have to throw away when you change the provider.

Is this really the "land of the free"?

Free Call Forward from VoIP number to mobile phone

Vinay presents a sophisticated solution which makes use of Voxalot as PBX and PhoneGnome as VoIP provider.

Its purpose is to let your mobile or PSTN phone ring whenever somebody calls your VoIP number. It also makes use of Sipbroker's access numbers so that friends from wherever in the world can call you for the price of a local call.

Although you can tell from the comments to Vinay's blog post that his solution is a quite difficult to understand, it's definitely worth reading. I would like to add that Vinay's solution rocks even more when you extend it with more inbound numbers from Tpad and Gizmo Call.

Another elegant solution for the same purpose could be the GSM gateway from 4S newcom:

Redirection of fixed office numbers to mobile phones works by routing an incoming call to an employee's desk phone to the employee's mobile phone, using the appropriate GSM channel on the above-mentioned GSM module. The call will then be completed at no cost.

The PBX from 4S newcom receives the phone call and forwards it to the cell phone over a built in GSM device which holds a SIM card with flat rate tariff, as you can read here.