TopTechNews:  

“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.”