I have had Ooma for almost 5 years. It is the older box. I use it in my winter vacation rental home. I have never had a complaint from guests. It always works when I use it. It is a refurbished unit. Have not paid a cent for each year that I have been using it. I understand that this one requires you to pay taxes.
Here is a link to go to a tax calculator. Mine would be $3.72 a month in the Phoenix area.
I use NetTalk Duo in my own winter house. It has some minor issues, but not bad at all for $30 a year. I have had Magic Jacks and they can be somewhat unreliable.
You can’t go wrong with Ooma, and this is a good buy. Don’t worry about it being refurbished. I bet that they are returns from big box stores and not even used.
I would not hesitate to replace my home phone service with Ooma.
I’ve used Ooma for my home office for over 2 years now, including faxes. There are some special codes you need to preface the fax number with that improves the fax transmitting. I don’t send or receive many faxes, but it has worked the few times I have.
Hey! I have had mines from Woot from 2010 and voice calls have been great. 3 Years ago, I had issues but Ooma “pushed” a firmware upgrade and it’s been fine ever since.
However, in reference to faxes - its hit or miss. I cannot trust mines to receive or send faxes. Usually sending faxes are alright but RECEIVING them are a 60 / 40 success-fail rate on my end. I even have an Ooma “Linx” attached to make it more dedicated but still experience some issues.
Honestly, I have not e-mail Ooma support since I still have Vonage too. I’ve had Vonage since 2006, and I get 99% of my faxes successfully so I got a low voice metered plan for faxes thru Vonage and use Ooma for my unlimited voice calls instead. Hope this helps peeps out making a decision in terms of faxes!
Bought one new in June. Opted to pay the porting fee ($39.99) in lieu of the $10 extra monthly for premier. Couldn’t be happier. Was paying Verizon ~$72 a month, now paying $4.90 (local jerk taxes - 3 - 911 fees).
As previously mentioned, bought an UPS unit for the modem, router and Ooma box and it’s worked flawlessly during minor outages. Just ordered another UPS for the DigitOne call blocker and wireless phone base.
It just works for me…
I’ve had my Ooma for about six months and have had fairly constant problems with it.
Often callers will say they can’t get through because of a busy signal. Sometimes calls will just cut out in the middle. Sometimes I pick up the phone and there’s no dial tone. And there is often a delay of a second or two on the line.
When the power died, my first Ooma unit died with it, and I had to negotiate with customer service for an hour before they agreed to send me a new one.
Also, my taxes in Maryland ended up around $7 a month, which ain’t nothing.
I bought an OOMA setup here last year for the same price. It is a refurbed unit and I have had no problems. We have the premium service that includes voicemail, 2 lines,caller ID, local and long distance. We live in Pa and our bill is $13.99 a month. I use one line for home and one for business. We were paying double that for a land line with half the services.
The service includes a blacklist for telemarketers and bill collectors and such. We never registered either line on the do not call list and I haven’ had one telemarketer since we started. If you do you can just go on line and add the # to block.
The service and machine have both performed wonderfully, the only problem we had when signing up was they gave us a # that was in the same area code but not “local” but we live in a small town so that may have been the problem.
@ thumbs up from me.
This is why I’m strongly considering moving from GV to Ooma. Other than integrating Sprint with GV, Google hasn’t done much with GV since they bought it as GrandCentral. I honestly think that after they integrate their phone services with “Hangouts” they will eventually kill GV free calling altogether and move to a per-minute model. Oh well. The free ride was nice while it lasted.
Ooma is even a good alternative to standard SIP services. Calculating the cost of this Telo plus regulatory fees/taxes for a year comes out to about $12 a month in my area. I haven’t found a SIP provider that would give unlimited outgoing US minutes for that price, let alone giving a DID/phone number.
I presently have MagicJack (2 years), and have not had any major problems. Are there any MagicJack customers that have also used Ooma, that can compare experiences with the two, including cost, positives and negatives, and recommendations? Thanks
I have my Ooma set up with distinctive-ring on the secondary number. My fax is set to only answer that distinctive ring. I sent one fax and got one back just to test it out. Both went through with no problems.
I am paying under $14/month for Ooma Premier and the required taxes.
I have a 15 year old Brother Intellifax 620 and have no problem receiving/sending faxes using my Ooma. I have only one line for fax and voice and have an answering machine connected to the Brother, the answering machine set up to get calls after four rings. If it is a fax, the Brother will take it. If voice, the Brother lets the answering machine take the call. Note that if a call comes in while I am receiving a fax on my one phone line, the call waiting tone will cause the fax to fail so you may want a separate Ooma (or second Ooma line) for faxes.
Not fax related, but if I am on a call and a second call rings, I can ignore it and Ooma will pick up that call and take the message for later retrieval. Handy because my teen daughter will often be on the phone and will ignore calls meant for the rest of us. I can retrieve the message directly from the Ooma device even while she keeps her call active (and active and active.)
But apparently you can’t set up the Ooma except in the USA. However, if you have a way to do the set up in the USA (friend, relative), then you can take the Ooma anywhere in the world, connect to broadband and make calls to any number in the USA. But if you live in Calgary, using the Ooma as I describe, you would need to pay the international per minute rate to call your next door neighbor unless you pay for the Ooma Premier service (free Canadian calls except to the Northwest Territories) or unless they also have an Ooma in which case there is no charge. Note that in-bound calls to you from your Canadian neighbors would be made to the Ooma’s USA number so they would pay a toll so no doubt you would still want to keep your current phone service.
My wife is a native of Mexico. We brought an Ooma which we set up using our home network to her chatty sister in Mexico City. The chatty sister uses her Mexico based Visa card to pay the taxes (probably also paying a fee to Visa for the dollar conversion). Obviously her Ooma cannot be used to call 911 since that would connect her to our local law enforcement because we set up the Ooma using our broadband and a local-to-us phone number. She has just one phone connected to the Ooma and the rest of her phones remain connected to her local Mexico City system.
Chatty sister also uses her Ooma to call her friends in the USA as well as those friends being able to call her using her Ooma phone number, saving both of them money.
Chatty sister also conducts business in the USA (she is a museum sub-director.) She used to do this via Skype but finds the phone to be far more practical. Unfortunately she cannot carry her Ooma to work because her IT folks won’t let her connect it to their network so she goes to the office late or home early to make needed calls.
Note that using her Ooma in Mexico is not legal in that country. Carlos Slim (one of the world’s richest people) wants his peso of flesh for those calls to the USA. YMMV depending on your country.
I didn’t pay anything up front for Vonage, but I do pay about $17.00/month for the lowest plan (i use maybe 20 minutes of talk time/month).
After buying this and paying the one-time charge to switch over my current phone number (yes, I know I could get a different one for free), this would pay for itself in a year.
However, the lowest Vonage plan that I have still includes some of the services that are found on the premium plan, but it sounds like the Ooma premium plan is cheaper than Vonage ($9.95 plus tax), so I guess I’m in for one!
I have been faxing from mine with no problems and no prefixes or other codes. Works great. BUY IT! Even with Ooma Premier, I still pay around $12-$13 a month. We don’t have a good cell signal at our house, and this has been GREAT for a landline replacement.
I have to have a land line because of a medical device made by Merline that transmits my defibrillator info nightly.
The device plugs into the wall jack with a standard phone cable. I can’t allow it to use my cable modem, per specialists.
Does anyone have experience with this type of situation?? I can’t call my specialist right now (7.30 pm) and they wouldn’t know anyway, I’m sure.
Hmm, I could try calling Merlin - I will do that but would still love any knowledge you might have.
TIA
Ps: the Merlin is capable of using a mobile phone but my specialists haven’t worked that out yet. IDK if knowing that helps in getting an answer. I understand there would be a monthly fee, but I’d pay my wireless company $100 monthly just to get out from under this @#$% bundle that my cable company nearly forces me to have re: cost. [you are all familiar with that i’m sure](and, I’m obviously exaggerating about that $100!)
I pay $25.00 monthly for a land line that only allows me to call certain exchanges in my area code (I have to look them up on the list before making the call - hahahaha!!) What a blasted waste of resources. BUT this is their lowest costing plan so… I simply do not use it EXCEPT for my 800# Merlin device. and we haven’t turned on our TV in 2+ years… whoa is me.
End of rant.
GrandCentral was actually better than GV is now. Google actually shrunk down the features. I loved GrandCentral and had high hopes that Google would have done something awesome with it. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying GC was better.