Ooma AirDial adds Call Alerts for POTS replacement

Ooma, Inc., a smart communications platform for businesses and consumers, today announced that it has added Call Alerts to Ooma AirDial, a leading solution for POTS replacement, making it faster and easier for facilities managers and other personnel to respond to emergencies.

Administrators can now select up to 10 recipients to get either SMS or email alerts when a call is placed on a line connected through AirDial. For example, when an emergency call is made from an elevator phone, alerts can go to the front desk, the maintenance staff and the building manager. The same can apply for other critical equipment, such as fire alarm panels and campus blue-light safety phones.

Call Alerts are added, edited or removed with just a few clicks in AirDial’s Remote Device Management web portal, without requiring any technical expertise or having to submit a tech support ticket.

In addition to Call Alerts, Ooma AirDial provides patented MultiPath technology, which simultaneously sends calls through AirDial’s wireless network and the customer’s existing broadband connection. This allows calls to continue uninterrupted if one of the paths becomes clogged or goes down.

POTS replacement is a growing necessity because analog copper-wire phone lines, also known as Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS, are rapidly being phased out, even as carriers are sharply increasing monthly rates and allowing reliability to deteriorate. A fully integrated POTS replacement solution, Ooma AirDial provides hardware, software, wireless connectivity and remote management – all from a single vendor.

Other industry leading features recently added to AirDial include:

• Embedded Multi-Carrier Support. Ooma AirDial units can now be switched between wireless carriers remotely, without having to change SIM cards.
• Parent/Child Accounts. Administrators managing multiple locations, or IT consultants managing multiple customers, can add or delete parent and child accounts across multiple devices, making it easier to oversee large AirDial deployments.
• Export of Call Logs. From the Remote Device Management portal, users can export call logs into spreadsheets to easily analyze usage trends.
• Insights View. With one click on an icon in the Remote Device Management portal, administrators can see a single screen summarizing the status of all their AirDial units.

“We’ve always viewed Ooma AirDial as an opportunity to deliver an advanced service far superior to POTS at a lower cost,” said Thad White, vice president of product management at Ooma. “Call Alerts are a perfect example, because copper-wire phone lines can’t provide anything like this powerful notification that increases both management awareness and safety.”