Ooma Telo Free Home Phone Service

Excellent voice quality and reliability, for free (2010-09-10) : 5/5
It is beyond belief that anyone is still paying a monthly bill for a home telephone, when services like Ooma are now available. If you hesitate, like I did, because of skepticism about the quality of the service, then this is a service well worth trying. My main concern was about voice quality, which I have found to be outstanding, even better than At&T's land line. The service is as reliable as your internet connection, so if you don't already have a good service, you may want to invest in one (with the help of your newly found savings).

The included features are superior to those of a traditional land line: voicemail (you can retrieve it from anywhere, including online), talking calle-ID, and excellent long distance rates.

This is a product/service that I easily recommend to friends.
Very long delays (although voice quality good) makes conversations very difficult. (2010-09-09) : 2/5
The OOMA base unit is big and ugly.

The call quality is good but has extrememly long delays (getting on for a second) that make holding conversations very difficult.

The fee per month for many of the features is poor value compared to alternives out there.

Noticable background hum (implying poor electronic layout or design).


What I liked:

Being able to keep a landline with the same number as the ooma, incoming calls come in on the landline (and through the ooma) but outgoing calls go over the ooma VOIP.

I cancelled service and am returning the unit because of the terrible long delays. Support sounded like it was in India with a room full of people talking so loud and additionally call quality problems (!!) making it very hard to even talk with support.

I have also PhonePower which has many of the OOMA features (such as two lines on the same number) included for free and for a two year prepaid deal costs much less with no monthly fees and includes some international calls for free. I recommend PhonePower.





what an awesome product and service (2010-09-09) : 5/5
How awesome is this phone! I've had it a week now and it works great. Call quality is perfect, no different than land line. Setup was super easy. Website is great. Voicemail is a snap. I can't say enough about it. So cool that's its free (except taxes and 911 fee). I was paying around 40 bucks a month for nationwide calling so this thing will pay for itself in 6 months and give me free phone service forever. Can't wait to "fire my phone company" as they put it :-)

Couple of pointers for others:
1. Make sure you have all the phone and the internet cable plugged in first before you plug in the power, otherwise the logo blinks red a little longer while it attempts to configure itself. The device will set itself up quicker if those connections are already established when it begins to startup for the first time.
2. They suggest putting it in between your cable modem (or DSL) and router so it can guarantee its data will have priority over any other internet data to keep call quality perfect. However, this was not an option for me as my modem and router are not in an accessible place so I had to plug it into the router after both of those devices. I am a technical person and was able to tell my router to give the Ooma device priority, but I'm not sure that even matters as most newer routers (last 5 yrs or so) can automatically figure out which data (or devices in this case) need priority.
Ooma Telo so far so good (2010-09-08) : 4/5
Bottom line it works. I am thrilled to be getting away from the greed of "a large phone company" that we have used forever. Ooma works without slowing down your PC at all. Clarity is excellent. Set up was super easy. I opted for the basic service so no more bills aside from monthly taxes which will be about $3.50 for me. I prepaid a seperate overseas calling plan which gives me England for an insane .0034 per minute and connections so far have been fine.
Messages are forwarded to a couple of emails so you know if you have messages to tend to. You allocate another number to get calls forwarded when and if internet is down. Ooma should pay for itself in 5 months for me.
Bought the New Telo unit. (2010-09-07) : 5/5
My sister has had an Ooma for over a year now without a single problem or complaint. Because of her experience, I bought one myself (the new Telo unit). Simply take every five star rating on Amazon for Ooma and add a big Ditto, from me. I cannot improve on all the other nice things that have been said. Ooma does exactly what it was designed to do and it does it amazingly well.