Ooma Telo Free Home Phone Service
Just happened to stumble across this product on a website last week, and
was immediately drawn to it. For many years we've been tired of paying
for two landlines to our home (~$60/month), and this looked pretty
good. After reading comments here and elsewhere, we bought a Telo from
the local Fry's here in Oregon.
Setup was very clean, and the audio sounded nice. But after digging a bit deeper we discovered that this Telo is a single-line replacement, although with the Premium service one can temporarily call up a second line. But we had two lines in the house we wanted to replace, one for personal and one for business.
Turns out the slightly-older Hub could do exactly what we wanted, when paired up with a Scout. Back to Fry's we went, and they fortunately had what we were looking for (they're discontinued, and getting harder to find).
I have to admit, the Hub setup instructions seemed baffling to me, what with all the various options and diagrams. All we wanted was to kill our landline service and splice Ooma in place, but some negative reviews gave the impression that you needed a Scout for every phone in the house. Not so. They need to re-write the instructions, but now with it discontinued I guess that point is moot. We won't be using the voicemail feature.
Incidentally, Ooma suggests putting the box just after your broadband modem and in front of the router/WiFi box for the house, so that if there is ever a contention for traffic your VOIP data will prevail. I elected instead to just plug the Ooma ethernet cable into one of the empty slots on our D-Link router. Absolutely no quality issues, even when downloading in parallel with using the phone. Oh, I have the router set up for MAC filtering, so we did have to load the MAC address, but that took all of one minute.
Additionally, for any location that has "E911" service (apparently pretty much everywhere these days) then Ooma works like a regular 911 service. If you dial 911 Ooma automatically forwards your name and address to the 911 center.
Anyway, we are now on the schedule to port over our two numbers to Ooma, and we will still use DSL (a "dry line") to deliver 1.5Mbit service to the house. We'll see how it goes, but so far it's looking great. Break-even should be in about 5 months, then just $10/month afterwards for two lines. Sweet.
UPDATE 25 Feb 2010:
My two numbers ported over to Ooma earlier today. The landlines went dead for incoming calls this morning, and the numbers showed up on the Ooma boxes about 4 hours later. Voice quality is excellent, everything appears to be perfectly normal.
UPDATE 10 Mar 2010:
Both phone lines in constant use, along with our computers. Everything works fine, voice quality appears to be same as POTS, saving $60 a month.
Setup was very clean, and the audio sounded nice. But after digging a bit deeper we discovered that this Telo is a single-line replacement, although with the Premium service one can temporarily call up a second line. But we had two lines in the house we wanted to replace, one for personal and one for business.
Turns out the slightly-older Hub could do exactly what we wanted, when paired up with a Scout. Back to Fry's we went, and they fortunately had what we were looking for (they're discontinued, and getting harder to find).
I have to admit, the Hub setup instructions seemed baffling to me, what with all the various options and diagrams. All we wanted was to kill our landline service and splice Ooma in place, but some negative reviews gave the impression that you needed a Scout for every phone in the house. Not so. They need to re-write the instructions, but now with it discontinued I guess that point is moot. We won't be using the voicemail feature.
Incidentally, Ooma suggests putting the box just after your broadband modem and in front of the router/WiFi box for the house, so that if there is ever a contention for traffic your VOIP data will prevail. I elected instead to just plug the Ooma ethernet cable into one of the empty slots on our D-Link router. Absolutely no quality issues, even when downloading in parallel with using the phone. Oh, I have the router set up for MAC filtering, so we did have to load the MAC address, but that took all of one minute.
Additionally, for any location that has "E911" service (apparently pretty much everywhere these days) then Ooma works like a regular 911 service. If you dial 911 Ooma automatically forwards your name and address to the 911 center.
Anyway, we are now on the schedule to port over our two numbers to Ooma, and we will still use DSL (a "dry line") to deliver 1.5Mbit service to the house. We'll see how it goes, but so far it's looking great. Break-even should be in about 5 months, then just $10/month afterwards for two lines. Sweet.
UPDATE 25 Feb 2010:
My two numbers ported over to Ooma earlier today. The landlines went dead for incoming calls this morning, and the numbers showed up on the Ooma boxes about 4 hours later. Voice quality is excellent, everything appears to be perfectly normal.
UPDATE 10 Mar 2010:
Both phone lines in constant use, along with our computers. Everything works fine, voice quality appears to be same as POTS, saving $60 a month.
