Ooma Core VoIP Phone System
by ooma
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List Price: Our Price: $170.00 You Save: $79.99 (32%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Customers in the UK,
Buy this product at amazon.co.uk
for British Pounds
Digital Cameras Photo Reviews of Ooma Core VoIP Phone System
Customer Review: Good product, poor customer service, BUT caveat emptor about UNLIMITED
Summary: 3 Stars
Good product and business idea, relatively easy installation, but clearly lacking in customer service department. BUT, and this is important, be aware about the Free Unlimited part of the advertisements!
Since this is a big attraction of the product, everyone needs to understand the actual limitations.
Unlimited means, well, no limits, right? Check with Webster's if you don't believe me. Duh, you think, isn't UNLIMITED what they said? Read on...
On the OOMA site in the FAQs, as well as other places, it states there is a 3000 minute monthly limit, subject to termination (or minute-by-minute fees).
So, UNLIMITED does not mean UNLIMITED. So much for Webster in this day and age.
The ad should say instead, 3000 free minutes monthly. But it doesn't. This raises questions about false advertising, and someone more litigious than I can pursue that. I'm more interested in considering the real cost-benefit trade-off.
First off, 3000 still sounds like lots of minutes, let's do the arithmetic and see. As it turns out, "Lots" is subjective to your situation.
For a 30 day month, this is an average of 100 minutes a day. Nets to 1 hour & 40 minutes talk time.
Now think about this carefully and set your expectations regarding that UNLIMITED statement. What is your household reality?
Do you have periodic teleconferences for work when you have to stay home? Or maybe you have a part-time work-from-home arrangement that still requires you to actually talk to people in your work team pretty frequently.
Two 1-hour meetings and you are over your daily allocation. Maybe low / no usage on the weekends will balance that out for you, maybe not.
Do you have teenagers and you wanted to recover from ruinous cell phone bills driven by seemingly endless social arrangements and prattle, teenaged angst conversations, or texting? Is OOMA really your answer or will you blow the minutes limit the same as your cell plan (which at least clearly tells the number of minutes you get per month, and if you have a good plan unused minutes might roll-over to the next month --- no indication of a roll-over benefit from OOMA)
Do you have a household with several people whose combined time adds up quicker than you'd think?
Are you temporarily or permanently house-bound and your frequent / lengthy conversations are a key lifeline to the outside world?
On the other hand are you an infrequent phone user, already have a broadband connection, and can't imagine your household spending an monthly average of 100 minutes a day? This could be a great deal for you!
Maybe you live single, maybe you are either out using your cell to stay in touch and make plans but still want a home line. Or maybe you stay at home and live in comparative social isolation...have no friends / family, no work meetings to attend to, no hobbies or groups you have to communicate with frequently, don't get stuck forever holding for customer support to OOMA or other companies, i.e. no life except your computer. (Do not feel alone, more and more people are living like this!)
You get the idea....this might be a great phone plan for you. Or not.
You decide how OOMA's minutes plan works with your reality, but do so with the right set of facts in your pocket.
Customer Review: Excellent product, slight improvement needed in customer service
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
I had actually been looking at this for awhile. My husband and I are both in our 20's, and like many of our peers, we primarily use our cell phones for communication. So we held off on getting a home phone. Still, there were many times I wished we had one. I cannot hear my cell phone ringing throughout my house, so unless I carried it around everywhere with me, I would miss calls. I also don't get the best cell phone reception in my house, so I found myself sitting outside, or by open windows when I'd have to make a call. Pretty annoying. At the same time, I didn't want to pay for home phone service either. That's when I started looking into this.
After the initial purchase, that's all you ever have to pay. Unless you want special features like several phone lines. Even with the special features, it ends up being about $10 a month. However, I find that I don't need those extra services.
I have Comcast, with only one internet connection, and I was worried that I would need to buy a router so that I could have both the ooma and the computer hooked up. But I was wrong, it connects very easily with the ethernet going from the modem to the ooma, and then from the ooma to your computer. So you only need one hookup, unless you want to keep your main ooma hub in a different room from your computer. Actually, the ooma comes with all the cords and accessories you need, including a splitter if you have DSL. The only thing it doesn't come with is a phone that you need to hook up to it. You can use any kind of phone, you don't need a special one. Once the hub is hooked up, you can plug the scout into any phone jack in your house (doesn't have to be connected to the internet) and you now have two lines.
Installation was fairly easy. If the machine is hooked up wrong, it'll flash red. The only problem I had, is once I had it hooked up, it's supposed to glow blue, and it didn't. It simply stopped glowing all together. The phone would make the sound as though it were connected, but I couldn't make any calls, and I couldn't call the ooma from an outside line. After maybe 15 minutes, it started working even though I hadn't done anything, but it still doesn't glow blue. But whatever, it works.
Ooma appears to be a small company (at least right now), without much in the way of customer service. You have to wait a long time in order to talk to one of the few people that works there. My husband is in the military, and as such we're prone to moving. I called customer service to ask if there's a fee involved in changing your phone number (so we could get a new local number if we moved). The man I spoke to sounded very frazzled and confused. He said, no, there's no fee to change the number, but you can't just change it whenever you feel like it, it needs to be for a 'real reason' (how they know it's a real reason, I'm not sure). And maybe in the future they'd charge a fee, but he doesn't know for sure. He sounded as if he was making up policy on the spot. The concept of "maybe in the future they'd charge a fee" kind of worries me. What else might they charge for in the future??
Customer Review: Ooma core is the way to go for free phone service
Summary: 5 Stars
I waited till after the ooma telo launch to make my ooma purchase, but after comparing service plans between the telo and the hub/scout I decided the old ooma core would serve me best without having to pay a cent in recurring fees. If you want the ten dollar a month premium plan then I would recommend the telo, but if you want the zero dollar a month freemium plan with full functioning caller ID and voicemail and no taxes ever then the old hub/scout core appears to be the better choice.
I've now had my ooma long enough to save $23.28 from not having to pay my November 2009 PhonePower bill. PhonePower is a great VOIP provider, so good that I felt bad breaking up with them, but they just can't compete with ooma. I've got better quality and reliability with ooma, and in ten months the ooma will have paid for itself. With a one year warranty on the ooma equipment I can't lose as long as ooma stays in business.
I also like the fact that I own my ooma equipment. I had to return the router I leased from PhonePower as part of the termination process, which entails packing it up and paying the postage to send it back. I will never have to return my ooma hub or scout (unless one of them were to break under warranty I suppose).
Ooma is a utopian type product in a world of planned obsolescence and recurring costs. In the long run it is always better to pay more up front for a long lasting optimal solution than to get suckered into a contract through the enticement of low startup and initial contract fees only to find those recurring fees rising over time. For example, I run my ooma over Verizon fiber optics (FIOS). Shortly after I got my ooma and terminated my PhonePower service, Verizon decided to raise my monthly FIOS bill by $10.00/month, and when I tried to have my plan downgraded from FIOS to DSL I was told by multiple Verizon representatives that once a home is converted to FIOS it can never be converted back to DSL, even though when I asked that same question prior to going with FIOS I was told it wouldn't be a problem switching back to copper. So, although it is technically possible to switch from FIOS to DSL, Verizon will not do it because it is not profitable for them.
I wish I could find something like ooma for my internet service, but since nothing like that seems to exist I'm on the lookout for a good high speed internet service with a rate that is locked in for life so that the ISP can't raise my rates at will after the expiration of the original contract.
So, between picking up high def TV through an antenna and running ooma on top of FIOS I essentially have a phone/TV/internet bundle for $42.99/month (soon to be $52.99/month) with every penny of that going to pay for my 5/2 Mbps (eventually going up to 10/2 Mbps) internet. That beats the daylights out of any bundle Verizon or Comcast has to offer. I'm thrilled with my free TV and phone, so if I could just lock in a low rate on my internet I'd be all set.
In summary, ooma is a rare find in this greedy world. I hope they can stay that way and remain profitable at the same time because I don't ever want to have to give up my ooma. All the phone companies I've dealt with in the past were like girls I dated but couldn't marry, but ooma is more like the wife I'm married to right now. We'll be together till death do us part.
Customer Review: Really a wonderful solution
Summary: 4 Stars
I wanted to get rid of our landline completely and use mobile phones, but my wife wasn't ready to cut the cord. Wanting to lower our monthly expenses ($45/month for Comcast Digital Voice), I started looking at alternative phone providers.
I came across Ooma and was intrigued: it seemed like it would meet our needs (keeping our phone number and using our existing phones) and it had no monthly bill! Sounds great!
I took the plunge, thinking that I could always send it back if it didn't work well. When the box came, I quickly set it up and got it running after working through one hiccup. Other than the presence of the Scout (a little box that you put in front of your home phone to use Ooma), nobody was any the wiser. I still had my Comcast phone service, which went through the Ooma for inbound calls as well as outbound local calls. Ooma kicked in for long distance calls and used my Internet connection instead of my landline. It worked great!
After a few days to test it out, I decided I'd keep it, so I bought a premiere subscription ($100/year) which included the cost porting my number to Ooma (normally $40). I sent in the paperwork, and four weeks later my port was completed and I was done with phone bills! The Ooma handles all of my phone calls with no issues at all, and the quality is fantastic: on par with Comcast Digital Voice.
We've been Ooma-only for the past few weeks, and have experienced no problems so far. Count me among the satisfied customers.
I recently set up another Ooma at my mother-in-law's house, and soon she'll be phone-bill-free too!
A few notes:
1. Ooma does not have any monthly cost, unless you buy the Premiere subscription for $100/year. The only thing you'll need to pay for are international calls, which they charge at very competitive rates (see their website for details).
2. Since Ooma uses your internet connection, if your internet goes down (due to a power outage, etc) you'll have no phone service.
3. Ooma does have 911 support: I called 911 to verify that it works, and the operator immediately could see my name, address, and phone number.
4. If you don't want to port your phone number, you can dump your local phone service completely, get a new number, and be up and running as soon as you set up the box.
5. When you receive your Ooma, you need to activate it on the Ooma website before it will work. The directions are clear and it takes about a minute to activate the device.
6. You should typically put your Ooma between your cable/dsl modem and your home router. The device ships with the cable needed for this. You can also put the Ooma inside your home network, but you won't benefit from Ooma's ability to restrict internet traffic to insure good phone quality.
7. Right now, faxes over Ooma don't work very well, at least in my experience. I typically scan a document and email it as a PDF. Your mileage may vary. Ooma is working on implementing a standard FOIP (fax over IP) service in the future.
8. According to press releases, Ooma users and Skype users can talk for free. I imagine that if you call a Skype user's phone number they don't get billed for the call, and likewise if they call you they don't get billed. I haven't tried this.
Customer Review: Great Features and Value, Easy to Set Up, Flawless Domestic Calling, Spotty International Service
Summary: 4 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Background: I've been using numerous VoIP products for several years. These include Vonage, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, VoIP Discount, and more. I feel very familiar with today's VoIP offerings and have a thorough understanding of Ooma's product. My current broadband setup is through a Comcast Cable modem. For the sake of comparison, I will use Skype and Yahoo! Messenger.
Setup: Ooma is extremely easy to install. A tech-savvy customer probably doesn't even need the instructions to set up Ooma. For the uninitiated, the included instructions are very clear and all the ports are easily identifiable. I can't imagine many people that would have a hard time physically setting up Ooma and activating the service on the company's web site.
Features: In addition to unlimited domestic calling, Ooma offers great features like caller ID, call waiting, and voicemail. These all work as advertised. I particularly like the voicemail notification options. Ooma also has premium services; for my calling habits, they're unnecessary, but I understand why some people would find them useful.
Domestic Calling: For me, this is where Ooma really shines. The call quality is fantastic -- definitely as good or better than calls I made through Skype or Yahoo! Messenger. The calls are extremely clear and I never had any connection issues. Considering the current price of the system, Ooma will pay for itself in less than a year if you compare it to all-you-can-eat offerings from phone and cable companies.
International Calling: When it works, it's very good. In terms of call quality, Ooma sounded significantly better than Yahoo! Messenger and on par with Skype. The Ooma rates are very competitive. For the countries that I frequently call, the rates were better than Skype (sometimes half the cost) and on par with Yahoo!'s. Unlike those services, you don't need to have a PC on to dial internationally. This is a huge feature for my household, since I live with people that want to make international calls but are not PC savvy.
Now for the bad news -- the international service has been spotty. I've been using Ooma service for more than a year. At times it works perfectly for international calls. At other times, it's very difficult to connect. There have been extended periods (sometimes weeks) where I've had to redial a number numerous times in order to connect an international call. Ooma's customer service was not helpful at all in these cases, offering advice like "dial the number slowly" and "don't use speed dial". I understand that this service is evolving and changes are made to it, but the main reason I'm taking a star off of this review is due to the inconsistent international service. While it has worked flawlessly for the last few months, I'm not comfortable relying on it without Yahoo! And Skype as backups.
Conclusion: Overall, Ooma is a great product and a fantastic value at its current pricing. It has served me perfectly for domestic calls. For international calls, the service is great when it works and frustrating when it doesn't.