SunRocket? Meet my friend, Ooma.

Michael Arrington must have Hollywood stardust in his eyes as less than 72 hours after the amazing flameout of SunRocket, TechCrunch is practically in a lather over Ashton Kutcher driven telephony service Ooma .Yes. You heard it right. Ashton Kutcher: Model, "Actor" and Television Producer is now Creative Director of a telecom company. At least, we think it's a telecom company. They don't actually say what exactly it is, other than for $399, you can get "free calls" within the US. For life.Of course, we all know what happens to people who buy proprietary hardware with the promise of low (or no) cost calls, "guaranteed" for life. Ooma? Meet SunRocket.What it looks like is that for $399 you get their "ooma hub" - which, according to its pictures and scant rumors, seems to be a two line answering machine. With a speakerphone. Oh, and Phone Line Networking to be able to connect "all of your phone jacks" to the hub using a device called a "Scout".Isn't Scout the name of one of Demi Moore's kids?

Anyway, back to the hub. There are eight buttons on the hub. The top two are numbered "1" and "2", which most likely correspond to being able to have two simultaneous calls (also known as "Call Waiting and Three Way Calling". The next two are a trash can and envelope, which I assume are to delete a voicemail message and call voicemail. The final four buttons are the standard controls for rewinding, stopping, playing and fast forwarding through a voicemail. You heard it here first. They've created a multi-line answering machine.The hub connects to the scouts presumably through Phone Wire Networking - a method of using the standard phone wires within a house to carry ethernet traffic which never really took off.

Personally, I prefer connecting one of those newfangled "cordless phones" to an unlocked $50 ATA which allows me to make cheap (or free) calls from every room in the house to any phone in the US. But again, I digress.It seems that the claim to fame is that ooma expects that at a good amount of users will still have traditional landline phone lines set up either out of 911 connectivity concerns or bundled with their DSL lines. Ooma will use a least cost routing scheme (which if memory recalls is already held by a very litigious patent holder) to route calls, when possible, to an ooma which will then call out and place the call.Now, call me just a tad bit paranoid, but if the ooma is dialing out to the standard phone network, that means that this end of the call is unencrypted (unencryptable even!). One line splitter and a $9.99 Trimline phone and you're able to listen in on other conversations. Plus, you can check your telco phone bill and get a list of numbers dialed. Forget about the fact that many people who retain their phone service after moving to this service will reduce their traditional phone service to a metered "pay by the minute plan" meaning that these outbound calls can start racking up the charges.

Can we say privacy concerns?

Again, in the land of losing propositions, this one seems to sit pretty high on the list of "what the heck were they thinking?" Considering that wholesale gateway providers (those necessary companies with a carrier license that bridge the classic phone and internet telephony worlds) aren't giving away ports, telephone numbers or gateway services for free, each customer starts generating cost for ooma day one. Without having a clear grasp on usage patterns, it's easy to forsee a world where $400 just doesn't cover the cost of the hardware and a year's worth of service... let alone a lifetime. If the bet is that people are such creatures of habit and will keep their traditional phone lines - then your service isn't really free, is it?

Maybe this is a prank that Kutcher is playing on the IT media folks - taking inspiration from the iPhone, GrandCentral and SunRocket announcements of late. Then again, maybe the passion for all things retro has convinced investors to sink money into what can only be thought of as a re-invisioned 1980-era answer-phone. If that's the case, I'll immediately start working on brick-sized cell phones and next-generation one way pagers.Either we're all being Punk'd, or the VC community is.