Review by pinhead3641 
UPDATED: 201 days ago
member for 5.5 years, 28 visits, last login: 121 days ago
 Placentia,Orange,CA
 Contract price not specified.
 "No monthly fee"
 "Will this company be solvent in five or ten years?"
 "Goodbye, AT&T"
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Ease of Installation:
Call Quality:
Reliability:
Tech Support:
Value for money:
(ratings match consensus)
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Update 5/9/2009
Our ISP is TWC/RoadRunner, and for whatever reason, our "10Mb/sec down, 1Mb/sec up" Turbo connection has been running at 35-55% of the advertised speeds of late. Last night I was talking with a friend-- also a TWC/RoadRunner subscriber-- on the phone, me using Ooma and he using the TWC VOIP service that he pays them for. Around 9:00 p.m., the quality of the call was so bad that I could not hear him talking for several 2-10 second intervals. The line was silent on my end, even though the call was still in progress. I don't know who to blame here... Ooma, TWC, or both. Obviously the service could be better, but I still have to admit, even if I have to avoid calling during certain peak traffic times, it beats paying AT&T $75/month.
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Update: 4/13/2009: Ooma had a major outage today, and our VOIP phone was down from sometime in the morning-- we noticed it around 11:00 a.m.-- until approximately 4:15 p.m. PDT.
In fairness to Ooma, this is the first outage we've noticed. Everything has worked well since we subscribed, with the exception of this outage today. We still have our cell phones, so it was at best a minor inconvenience.
Our number port was completed on schedule (it took 34 days from the day we activated our hub), and Ooma kept us updated throughout the process.
I'm going to keep on using Ooma as long as they are in business. I'm even getting my non-tech-saavy parents to switch.
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A tech-saavy coworker tried another better-known VOIP provider-- one that spends a lot of money on TV commercials-- and said his experience couldn't have been worse. This was a few years ago, though, but it is relevant because it made me very reluctant to abandon my AT&T landline for VOIP technology.
Recently, I read some very detailed and positive reviews of the Ooma service on one or two blogs, on Amazon.com, and also on the warehouse store Web site, and these convinced me to give it a try. I dropped just under $250 to get the Ooma hardware-- one of their hub units and a scout unit, in a bundle pack-- shipped to me. I don't know why it took Big Warehouse Store two weeks to ship it to me, as they are usually more timely, but once I had the hardware, I went through the activation steps, paid $40 to have my current number transferred from AT&T to Ooma, and another $50 for international minutes, plugged in the hardware, and was making calls in about 30 minutes.
I was motivated to try this because we were spending $57/month on the cable modem, another $60-$65/month for satellite TV, $75/month on AT&T, and about $80/month for our cell phone service. I found myself thinking that it is simply stupid to spend around $300/month for "connectivity," or whatever you want to call it. So I started looking for some way to consolidate/bundle/cut expenses. I considered the various possibilities, and when I saw this Ooma hardware in the Big Warehouse Store monthly mailer, I thought it would be worth a try. I was on the verge of trying my ISP's VOIP service anyway, for which I believe they charge about $25/month, but I figured at that rate I'd break even with the Ooma hardware in 10-12 months, provided Ooma stays solvent.
So even though this is just the second day that the Ooma hardware has been installed, we've been making and receiving calls (even overseas calls), and it seems everything that was promised is true... so far. We still need to wait for our number to be ported over-- supposedly it takes 3-4 weeks-- and until then we need to keep our AT&T account alive and paid up, but if everything goes smoothly, I have just one more $75/month AT&T bill to pay.
I'll try to remember to update this review after three or four months.
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