Ooma Telo VoIP Home Phone System $145

[Selma]

http://woot.com/

[wikipost]

For people that don't use their phone much OR don't want to pay for this huge up front cost (and buy a device that can ONLY use with Ooma), there are other alternative like VoIP.ms and Callcentric.
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r25313205-VoIP.ms-vs-Callcentric-vs-Ooma

http://voip.ms/
http://www.callcentric.com/

Link to calculate the FEE you need to pay each month for Ooma
http://www3.ooma.com/tax_calculator.php

Fee is $3.47 a month which is $41.64 a year for ALL the ZIPCODE one can try.
And since this is fee and taxes, they can increase it when any of those Regulatory/Federal/State fee increase.
And in Ooma's own forum, they said currently Ooma is absorbing the state & local taxes. They are implementing state & local taxes in their system and they will be passed on to the consumers if applicable. That's why currently the State & Local taxes show $0.00


There are services that provide FREE US nationwide call using your computer
MagicTalk http://www.magictalk.com/
Google Voice (call others from Gmail or mobile phones app or by dialing your own Google Voice number) https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?service=grandcentral&passive=1209600&continue=https://www.google.com/voice&followup=https://www.google.com/voice&ltmpl=open

Just FYI, the NEW Magic Jack Plus is supposed to come out 1Q this year and retail for around $50 (include 1 year service and $19.99 a year afterward). Some article said the magic Jack plus is a stand alone device that works by way of both WiFi and 4G (can also connect to PC like the old Magic Jack if you want). They also add processor and memory into the device. They said the sound quality will be better also but won't be able to confirm until they actually release it. If the quality is good, the price of Ooma device may go down because of better competition.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Groundbreaking-Invention-New-pz-3132373440.html?x=0&.v=1






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[microkelvin]

will buy it when it's under $100. I'll stick with free unlimited call to USA and canada using gmail for now.

selma missed "refurbished" term?

[Psygnius]

Although Refub, still the best deal on a Telo.

[JasonD18]

Might just have to pull the trigger this time.

[trifler]

Anyone notice that this refurb has a 180 day warranty? All their refurb Hubs sold from authorized retailers get a full year...

[phillip9]

I'm going to wait until it is under $100.

I have a similar setup from Skype, that cost about $189 and came with 2 cordless phones. If I hadn't already paid for that setup, this would be more attractive.

it will eventually be worth switching to OOMA because ooma supports faxing and skype does NOT. I have heard some people have problems with faxing on Ooma though and others say they have never had problems, so thats why I'm waiting for the SUB-$100 price.

For people on the edge, skype has had good calling sound for me, but the lack of fax is upsetting. Ooma seems to really have their act together, they have a lot of hardware you can use to really get the traditional telco experience. I think they have a better feature set and lower costs than skype.

Ooma for only $10.00 extra per month gives you their premium features, including a 2nd line, voice mail and tones of stuff I would not use, with skype you pay extra for each feature you add. and skype's hardware is out-of-stock half the time.

[kugel]

For many people, waiting until Ooma price drops under a certain limit makes no sense, since they are bleeding $20-30 a month to their current landline/voip provider.

[LuckyHal]

For me it makes sense.

I don't have a landline or voip, I just use my cell. I'm waiting for the price of Ooma to drop so I can have a fax machine. I don't think I'd use for voice, but ya never know.

For others, yes, you should probably get rid of that landline ASAP!

For many people, waiting until Ooma price drops under a certain limit makes no sense, since they are bleeding $20-30 a month to their current landline/voip provider.

[Fibrocyte]

For many people, waiting until Ooma price drops under a certain limit makes no sense, since they are bleeding $20-30 a month to their current landline/voip provider.

Agreed. And Ooma is hands-down the best VOIP offering in terms of quality and savings. Particularly so if you pay $0 ever for it like I do (got in way early).

[MozartA]

For me it makes sense.

I don't have a landline or voip, I just use my cell. I'm waiting for the price of Ooma to drop so I can have a fax machine. I don't think I'd use for voice, but ya never know.

For others, yes, you should probably get rid of that landline ASAP!

For people live in area that has Earthquake, big storm, or even tornado that can knock out your electricity for days, you definitely want to keep landline. If your power is out, the only thing that may work is your landline since you don't have electricity for your internet or to recharge your cell phone (even if the cell tower work which may not).
Plus in order for voip to work, both your internet and your voip company need to be VERY reliable. Even if Ooma probably provide pretty good services, but what about your ISP? Have to think about those before you go to Voip only.

FYI, if you don't use your phone much, you may want to get Callcentric http://www.callcentric.com/ which is pretty cheap if you don't make a lot of call. Plus you can get a generic device that can work with most VoIP instead of buying a device that ONLY work with Ooma plus a huge up front cost.

[Wai-kee]

http://woot.com/

Please put "refurbished" in the title.

Just picked one up from Costco couple days ago for $179 (new), in favor of their return policy and comes w/ 2 months premium service. Figured I will get the Ooma box paid for itself in less than 6 months.

Had it hooked up last night, pretty straight forward and in less than 5 minutes. Took longer to fill in the registration and the paper work to port the number over, for a one time $40 fee, and waited much longer to get ATT to change my DSL/phone to DSL (dry-loop) only. I should have jumped onto this several years ago. :-(

[Psygnius]

For people live in area that has Earthquake, big storm, or even tornado that can knock out your electricity for days, you definitely want to keep landline. If your power is out, the only thing that may work is your landline since you don't have electricity for your internet or to recharge your cell phone (even if the cell tower work which may not).
Plus in order for voip to work, both your internet and your voip company need to be VERY reliable. Even if Ooma probably provide pretty good services, but what about your ISP? Have to think about those before you go to Voip only.

FYI, if you don't use your phone much, you may want to get Callcentric http://www.callcentric.com/ which is pretty cheap if you don't make a lot of call. Plus you can get a generic device that can work with most VoIP instead of buying a device that ONLY work with Ooma plus a huge up front cost.


You do realize that most modern house phones require electricity to work too, right?

[tulsarick]

I'm leaning toward Ooma but can't find an answer about my Dish receiver. Anyone got Ooma who has Dish? I assume you lose your phone connection or is there a way to connect your Dish reciver to Ooma? Thanks

[MozartA]

You do realize that most modern house phones require electricity to work too, right?

I assume you know phone line do provide enough electricity for quite a lot of modern corded phone to work. And usually phone line will still work even during power outage because it has separate power source (their own backup power generator in each CO).
A lot of people live in those area know to get at least one phone that doesn't require AC Power in case of power outage.

Some of the best selling corded phones actually don't require AC power.
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=dp_brlad_entry?ie=UTF8&node=172746

[Psygnius]

I assume you know phone line do provide enough electricity for quite a lot of modern corded phone to work. And usually phone line will still work even during power outage because it has separate power source (their own backup power generator in each CO).
A lot of people live in those area know to get at least one phone that doesn't require AC Power in case of power outage.

Some of the best selling corded phones actually don't require AC power.
http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=dp_brlad_entry?ie=UTF8&node=172746

And you do realize that most of the households that still use landlines use cordless phones, right?

I think my family stopped using corded phones around 1998.

[MozartA]

And you do realize that most of the households that still use landlines use cordless phones, right?

I think my family stopped using corded phones around 1998.

I think you are missing what I was saying. First I was talking about people living in area that have more frequent Earthquake, big storm, etc that have higher chances of power outage. You can said most households in US is not in Earthquake/big storm, etc area but that has nothing to do with what I was talking. Second thing I said is many people in those area likely keep at least one corded phone that don't require AC power. But I didn't say that is their primary phone. They may have multiple phone jacks and use corded phone in at least one of them. If their house has multiple phone jacks, there is no reason to have all their phone jacks connect to different cordless phones. More likely they have one cordless phone system with 2-3 handsets connected to ONE phone jack and the rest of the phone jacks use corded phones. Or they can also store the corded phone in their garage or storage room and take it out when they need it.

And if you clicked on the corded phone in Amazon and read the reviews yourself. People are still buying them the reason I mentioned.

http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=dp_brlad_entry?t=slickdeals&tag=slickdeals&ie=UTF8&node=172746

Most of my friends/relatives use cordless phone too but all of them also have at least one corded phone. So whatever you said doesn't really conflict with what I was saying.

[el-cheapo]

I have my phone service through Comcast and as such if I lose power I lose phone also.
However, this is never a big deal as I can use cell phone instead.

I do also have a generator, but in my experience when the power goes out internet goes down as well.

Not sure if I would buy a refurb Ooma though, and the last time I ordered from woot it took forever to get the item.

[cricketgeek]

does anyone know how is the call quality of VOIP.MS, Iam planning to switch from Vonage

[koolwadz]

does anyone know how is the call quality of VOIP.MS, Iam planning to switch from Vonage


I would try both in parallel and see which one works. I am an ATT customer. amongst the 2 I have heard vonage is far superior.

[cricketgeek]

I would try both in parallel and see which one works. I am an ATT customer. amongst the 2 I have heard vonage is far superior.


That helps, Thanks. Vonage is sucking money by tax.. paying 13$$ tax for 14.99 plan

[koolwadz]

That helps, Thanks. Vonage is sucking money by tax.. paying 13$$ tax for 14.99 plan


This is what is odd, I do not understand why this would be happening. In Chi too a 25.99$ plan turns out to be like 40+. (switching the address to a non chicago address brings it down to 35. may be u can do somethink like that too :-p

by non chicago I meant, a suburb

[overzeetop]

I bought a Telo about a month ago and ported my Verizon number. I spend the $10/mo for the "premium" service, and have been pretty pleased so far. There seems to be the occasional blip, but I've never had a call drop, and the quality is on par with the landline I used to have.

They have an iPhone app that allows VoIP calls over wifi and 3g. It's $10 for the app and 1.2c/min for calls (250 free minutes if you have their Premier service on your device), which is highway robbery, BUT - when you dial out from you VoIP, the CID sent is your Telo CID. Since I use this for business, and would prefer not to give out my cell number (so I when I'm off, I'm really off) - that happens to be a killer feature.

[MozartA]

This is what is odd, I do not understand why this would be happening. In Chi too a 25.99$ plan turns out to be like 40+. (switching the address to a non chicago address brings it down to 35. may be u can do somethink like that too :-p

by non chicago I meant, a suburb

This is already happening to Ooma. Ooma used to be have no taxes/fee. More than a year ago, they start charging $11~12 a year taxes/fee. And last year they increase that to ~$42 a year.

And even in their own website forum they said currently Ooma is absorbing the state & local taxes. They are implementing state & local taxes in their system and they will pass on to the consumers if applicable. That's why currently the State & Local taxes show $0.00.

So make sure you still have the non chicago address since that may make the same different once Ooma start charging State & Local taxes. :)

[DealMayhem]

I have been using this since last June. Good voice quality and $3.47 is taxes is very little compared to $35 we were paying to ATT. We will recover $200 original purchase price in less than one year.

[sher]

My friend bought refurbished device (OOMA) from Frys (Atlanta area) for $100.

They get the refurbished in stock from time to time.

[Wai-kee]

I would try both in parallel and see which one works. I am an ATT customer. amongst the 2 I have heard vonage is far superior.

It all depends on how fast is your internet speed. I am using ATT DSL Express, ATT advertised speed is 1.5 mbps download and 375 kbps upload, but ATT never be able to deliver at that speed. As long as your internet speed is around 1.2 mbps download and 220 kbps upload, you will get pretty good voice quality. Anything lower than that will have spikes and squeaks in your voice line, that is from my experience when using Ooma. You can go to speedtest.net and do your speed check.

I believe ATT purposely tweak the DSL speed to lower than what they promised, to trick user to subscribe to their higher rate plan. I was paying DSL/voice and switched to DSL only (dry loop), the speed dropped once I switched over. Took me 2 weeks to fight with ATT CS, and they were speechless and could not explain why the speed dropped. It was the same phone line and the same modem and the same hardware, except the line is now DSL only, without the voice plan. When the real technician showed up (after 2 weeks) to look into the "problem", he checked all the lines and everything is fine. He then disappeared for an hour (for lunch ?), came back and claimed that the line was "fixed". What a joke!! I bet that he just called in from his truck and ask to put my line back to "normal". I can foresee that there will be a class action law suit coming, just like what happened to USWest a decade ago, that they over charged their customers and tricked them for a higher fee. I had to threathen ATT to disconnect the service until they agreed to fix it. Very disappointing with such a (used to be) great company. No wondered they got kicked out from the Blue Chip index and became penny stock, and was bought by SBC.