Obihai

» see obihai.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Obihai Technology filed its first and only Form D with the SEC on 10 March 2010, from an address on Stevens Creek Boulevard in Cupertino, reporting $1.5 million raised and no revenues yet. The officers listed were Jan Fandrianto and Sam K. Sin, who had built telephone adapters twice before, at Komodo Technology and then at Sipura Technology, and had sold both to Cisco. That single filing is the entire securities record of the company. Whatever else it did over the next eight years, it never went back to the SEC for more money.

What it made was an analog telephone adapter, a category so dull that the only reason anyone remembers this one is what it was pointed at. The OBi100 had one socket for a telephone and the OBi110 added a second for an outside line, and both of them knew how to log into Google Voice. Google Voice gave Americans a free phone number with free calls inside the country, and until the OBi arrived, using it meant sitting at a computer. The adapter moved it to the handset on the hallway table, and it cost $38.

Polycom announced on 4 January 2018 that it had agreed to buy the company, without disclosing a price. Six months later Plantronics bought Polycom for $2 billion, renamed itself Poly in 2019, and sold itself to HP in 2022 for about $3.3 billion including debt. The free cloud service that had made the OBi a cult object rode along through all three transactions as a line item, and on 12 July 2024 HP published an end-of-life notice for it. The answer it gives under the heading "What exactly is happening?" is this: "We have made the tough decision to turn off the AWS (Amazon Web Services) subscription that runs the OBiTALK Consumer Portal Service."

~ the chronicle ~

~ the box on the shelf ~

ObiTALK is what made a dull appliance feel like a service. It was a web portal that configured your device for you, so that setting up a voice-over-IP line involved choosing a provider from a menu rather than typing SIP credentials into a form. It also ran something called the OBi Ring Network, which gave every device a number of its own, so two people with OBi boxes anywhere on earth could call each other directly by dialing it. All of that ran on servers Obihai paid for and charged nobody to use.

The price comparison in 2014 explains the appeal better than any feature list. A competing Ooma box cost $150 and a Vonage line ran $27 every month. The OBi was under forty dollars once, and the calls after that were free, because Google Voice was free.

~ the google years ~

The relationship with Google was never a partnership so much as a tolerated arrangement. Google Voice originally spoke XMPP, an open protocol, which is how the OBi got in at all. At the end of 2013 Google said it was dropping XMPP for something proprietary and told third-party applications to stop using it by 15 May 2014, which was reported everywhere as the death of the free OBi phone line. Obihai's own blog post of 17 May is a small masterpiece of corporate understatement: the deadline had passed, and "like you, we have observed Google services using XMPP are still connected and working." Four months later, on 11 September 2014, Google made the integration official.

Not one piece of this was usable from where I live. Google Voice was a United States product with a United States number attached, and Turkey has never appeared on Google's list of supported countries for it, before or since. So the OBi stayed a box I read about and never a box I could buy. The feature everybody bought it for was a property of the American phone network that happened to be reachable from a $38 adapter.

The first casualties came in November 2017, when Obihai posted a note headed "End of the Line for Google Voice on the OBi100 and OBi110" explaining that the software on the first-generation devices was no longer compatible with new Google Voice server security requirements. The boxes had been declared end of life the previous year, so no fix was coming. The second-generation OBi200 series went the same way on 18 December 2023, exactly two years after its end-of-sale date.

~ the last provisioning server ~

The 2024 notice is unusually honest about what it is doing. It says the devices were never guaranteed anything: "OBiTALK was provided as a free service for users of the OBiHAI devices without warranty. As these devices have reached the end of their serviceable lifespan, the OBiTALK service is being discontinued." It promises that the hardware keeps working, that you can still configure it by hand and register it with another provider, and it names eight of them. The devices were not bricked. They were orphaned.

Then it explains how the Google connection will actually end, and the mechanism is pure neglect: once configured, the device talked to Google directly, so "it is anticipated that most devices will just continue to work for some period. At some point in the future, due to the expiration of security certificates, the integration will stop working." The portal closed on 31 October 2024, sign-in died the next day, and HP deleted every stored configuration. The notice signs off with "Thank you for being an important part of the OBiTALK journey."

obitalk.com is still answering today, serving one short page that says the service is no longer available. HP renewed its TLS certificate in March 2026 and let it expire in September, so a browser now refuses the page before it can tell you the thing is dead. obihai.com stopped resolving sometime after March 2025, when it was last seen forwarding to poly.com. A tombstone outlived its own certificate, and that tombstone is all of Obihai that is still switched on.

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