Ooma AirDial Continues to Revolutionize POTS Replacement with New Features

Ooma AirDial Continues to Revolutionize POTS Replacement with New Features

By Greg Tavarez

Traditional copper-wire telephone lines, commonly referred to as plain old telephone service (or POTS) face obsolescence as providers increase their monthly charges and neglect quality of service. This presents major difficulties for safety devices and essential business systems that rely on POTS, such as fire alarms, elevators, fax machines, public safety phones and building access systems.

The reason is simple. Those systems relying on POTS often cannot migrate to VoIP. The migration process is a complicated one. Think about it. The process requires significant investment in infrastructure, compatibility testing, regulatory compliance and ensuring reliability.

There is one company that works to ease that process, though: Ooma, with its innovative POTS replacement solution, Ooma AirDial. Ooma provides advanced voice and collaboration features including messaging, intelligent virtual attendants and videoconferencing to help them run more efficiently. As for AirDial, it replaces traditional POTS lines by merging the AirDial base station, virtual analog phone service from Ooma, nationwide wireless network data and voice connection, and cloud-based management using Ooma Remote Device Management. The online portal enables monitoring and management of AirDial units from a single location, accessible from anywhere.

So, Ooma is adding to AirDial’s capabilities with new management features. These new features include API integration, roles-based access, call logs, hunt groups, temperature readings, number porting and search capabilities.

The new API integration allows network managers to streamline workflows by passing AirDial status information and notifications into any monitoring tool that supports REST-based APIs. This integration increases efficiency by combining AirDial monitoring with existing workflows in Network Operating Centers.

The new roles-based access provides four levels of RDM access: Owner, Administrator, User and Editor. This feature gives organizations flexibility in making RDM widely accessible without the risk of unintended changes. For example, only Owners and Administrators are able to add and remove users, while Editors cannot.

The call logs feature provides a log, updated in real-time, of all outbound and inbound calls on each phone line connected to an AirDial device. This feature is useful for troubleshooting, confirming that equipment is operational and establishing the time for crucial events such as 911 calls.

The hunt groups feature allows AirDial units to be configured to roll over an inbound call to one or more lines if the first line is busy, doesn't answer or is offline. This is critical for certain use cases, such as on-premise PBXs in retail locations that have a single inbound phone number to reach the store. Additionally, AirDial allows setting the outbound Caller ID to a single number for calls made from multiple lines.

Number porting is also now possible. This means that existing phone numbers for equipment connected to AirDial devices can be ported to Ooma from an RDM screen, removing the need to contact Ooma customer support, accelerating the timeline when porting multiple phone numbers.

Administrators are now able to search RDM for individual AirDial devices by individual phone numbers, equipment labels and LTE status. This feature makes it easy, especially when managing large numbers of AirDial devices, to quickly find a relevant device or group of devices.

Lastly, temperature readings are displayed on RDM, showing the internal temperature for individual AirDial devices, indicating whether the device is in a location that has become too hot or too cold.

“POTS replacement is complicated, and we have been working hard to introduce features that support seamless installation, number porting, testing and monitoring to ensure critical equipment connected to legacy POTS lines remains reliable,” said Thad White, Vice President of Product Management at Ooma.

Adding to what White said, because of the enhanced efficiency and flexibility achieved through Ooma’s ongoing efforts to expand Remote Device Management features (especially with these new innovative features), AirDial is a solution that should be utilized more when replacing POTS.




Edited by Alex Passett
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MSPToday Editor

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