Ooma Home Phone Service Blocks More Telemarketers and Robocallers Than Ever

Palo Alto, CA - Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016

Ooma, Inc. (NYSE: OOMA), a leading smart communications platform for small businesses and consumers, has expanded one of its most popular features, the Personal Blacklist. Ooma home phone service customers can now block up to 1,000 phone numbers, including entire area codes, bringing relief to consumers fed up with the increasing number of unwanted calls. In fact, a recent Ooma survey of nearly 6,000 customers found that blacklisting ranks second as a favorite feature, only behind “savings.”

“In the last two years alone Ooma has blocked more than 36 million telemarketer and other unwanted calls,” said Eric Stang, CEO of Ooma. “We’ve built an exceptional phone service that puts our customers in control of who can ring their phone – preventing nuisance and more importantly, potential fraud.”

In the first four months of 2016, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received more than 1.6 million complaints about unwanted calls. Ooma offers three customizable methods to block calls for the most robust defense available today against spam calls:

• Personal Blacklist: A private, customizable list of up to 1,000 phone numbers Ooma Telo users wish to block. Users can add and remove numbers including entire area codes they’d like blocked or sent to voicemail.
• Community Blacklists: Contains tens of thousands of phone numbers identified by Ooma and its user community as sources of spam and telemarketing calls.
• Expanded Blacklist: Taps into a third-party database of suspected telemarketers, robocallers and phone spammers. When enabling the Expanded Blacklist, Ooma Telo customers are protected from unwanted and unsolicited calls from more than 850,000 known sources of phone spam.

“Call blocking is my favorite Ooma feature and has reduced spam calls by 90 percent,” said Jeff Leeds, Ooma customer since 2009. “Now I know exactly who is calling and have the freedom to block or send anonymous and unwanted calls straight to voicemail, in just one click.”

With the 2016 Presidential Election underway, Ooma expects consumers to receive a record number of robocalls over the next several months. Ooma is paying particular attention to swing states such as Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania to aggressively add calls from political and polling organizations (both of which are exempt from the National Do Not Call List) to the company’s community and expanded blacklists.

Built on an innovative technology platform, the Ooma Telo home phone service provides all of the features of a traditional home telephone and more, without the high cost. Ooma Telo features excellent HD voice quality and reliability, even when customers encounter poor Internet performance. Customers who have an existing landline phone can switch to Ooma, keep their own phone number and use blacklisting to effectively wipe out telemarketers and robocalls. Ooma Telo also integrates with consumers’ favorite smart home devices including Amazon Echo, Philips Hue light bulbs, Nest Protect and Nest Thermostat.

In addition to blacklisting, Ooma’s Premier service (available for $9.99 per month) offers a number of powerful features for customers including: an expanded free calling area, Instant Second Line, voicemail to email forwarding, ringing of your home and mobile phone simultaneously, free mobile calling using the Ooma mobile app, voicemail monitoring and more. For a complete list of features and benefits, please visit: premier home phone service.