Ooma reduces routing costs 10% with NexOSS

With the help of TransNexus, Ooma has recently reduced their routing costs by 10% with LRN route optimization.

Ooma is a breakthrough technology start-up, based in Palo Alto, CA which provides a VoIP alternative to traditional home phone service. Founded in 2004, Ooma offers a consumer electronics device that provides free nationwide calling in the U.S. and Canada and advanced telephony services to hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide.

As Ooma grew and began scaling up their network, they began to notice that their calls were not consistently being routed to the lowest cost carrier. According to Toby Farrand, VP of Engineering and Operations at Ooma, “We would route a call to one of our ITSPs who advertised the lowest rate to a particular exchange, but we would often find that the target phone number had moved to another carrier, so our ITSP would not honor its advertised rate.”

The simple solution to this problem is to route calls based on the Local Routing Number, or LRN, instead of the dialed telephone number. Traditionally, in order to do this, SIP service providers have had to query the U.S. Number Portability Administration Center (NPAC) for each outgoing call. However, sending a number portability query to an external database adds expense, as well as a critical dependence on an external network resource.

Ooma chose instead to use the TransNexus Routing, Operations, and Billing Support System (ROBSS). ROBSS is a simple and low cost solution for complete VoIP network management. It is made up of the OSPrey routing server and the NexOSS web interface.

What makes this solution unique in number portability solutions is that it allows Ooma to host the NPAC database locally within their own network. Their server then stays automatically synchronized with the NPAC, ensuring that their routing is based on near real time LRN data.

The TransNexus ROBSS solution is simple and easy to use. Operators use NexOSS to provision routes, rates, and number translation rules, which are used to create a Least Cost Routing (LCR) table. NexOSS pushes this table to the OSPrey routing server. When an Ooma customer makes a call, their network queries the OSPrey server, which uses its locally hosted NPAC database and the LCR table to return the least cost route, based on LRN.

“The Transnexus tool provided us with a way to dramatically increase the accuracy of our routes,” said Farrand. “Our routing costs were reduced by more than 10% through the LRN optimization. The flexibility we get from the TransNexus tool improves our call quality and call completion rate as well,” said Farrand. “TransNexus has given us excellent service and they have been receptive to our suggestions for future improvements to the tool,” said Farrand. “We are looking forward to integrating TransNexus’ next release, which will allow for us to peer with 11-digit routing.”

Read the complete case study here.