Over the last two years I've written twice about my great experience (initial review & review after first year) with using Ooma Telos home phone service. For most people that know me, I will frequently tell my friends and family about money savings deals, tools, or devices. The Ooma phone unit is one of those products that spurs the savings excitement in me. I publically admit that I get a little too excited about saving money and finding deals, but you can't blame me! :) I guess that's the true mark of a thrifty guy!
Through the usage of the Ooma phone service I've racked up $184's of total savings after the first year and the savings after two years have netted me a total of $568 in savings! BOOM! The longer I own the device the more my savings stacks up over the life of the phone adapter, because it amoritizes the base price of the unit over the life of it's usage.
- Minimum internet speed – atleast 1Mb's down and 256Kb's up speed. Ooma can work in rural areas too, if the bandwidth tests pass.
- Placement of Ooma unit – since the Ooma is so bandwidth intensive, I highly recommend placing the Ooma unit between your ISP router and home router. So in order of devices, ISP router uplinks to the Ooma device, and the Ooma device uplinks to your home wired/wireless router.
- Premium features – the premium services are great for large families, on the go a lot, or aren't always home.
Overall, here are the features you get by going with Ooma $10/month premier service:
- Free porting of your old number over to Ooma
- Threeway calling – love this! Already used this feature to talk to Aaron & Laurie from TheFrugalFarmer.
- Voice-to-text – great for on the go families or if you are frequently away from home.
- Call forwarding
- Privacy features – these features allow you to restrict anaymous calls or telemarketers. Love it! Plus you can create block lists for people you don't want calling ya.
Now that this is the second year of service I added the premier features, because of how well it's already been working.
Ditch your landline and starting saving with an Ooma Telo
I'd love to hear from our readers on how their Ooma service has been, and if any of our readers switched their home phone based on our reviews. Also I'd like to hear any other VOIP suggestions that our readers would like us to write a review on.
16 Comments
I was a long time Vonage customer (started @ $14.99 for 400 mins/month), but after years of rate hikes, I was up to paying $24.99 for ~700 mins/month… This was no loner a savings, so I made the switch about 6 months ago to Ooma. I actually carried both (with Vonage forwarding to Ooma for a month or so) before being convinced that it worked as advertised. Then I ported my number to Ooma and gave vonage the heave-ho. They have been trying desperately to get me back, but I told them… You are too expensive! Long live Ooma!
I’ve been researching this product for months but I still have some questions my U-verse router is set up in a room across the house away from where the telephone is. What do I need to link the telephone with Ooma which will be in another room near the router. Help please.
I am a beta tester for Ooma, and have used them going on 5 years. 4 incedible services left out are multi-ring, (incoming calls ring simultaneously on chosen cell #), free second phone #, (I have a second # local to my mom in Arizona…no longer a toll call for her to call me), Ooma smartphone app, (urgent cell call…no cell reception…find open wifi and dial away), and call notifications, (get text/email instantly with audio file attached when someone leaves you a message.
I’ve used the basic Ooma phone for over seven years–with great success! I was a very early user so I have ZERO charges per month. The Telo is cuter than my unit and I could pay about 4 bucks a month for more features, but I really don’t need them. They no longer “support my unit”, but it’s never needed support. Costco frequently sells them. Gotta love FREE!
I didn’t find this review until it was linked via Facebook, so I didn’t buy Ooma because of it.
However, I’ve had the basic service for over a year and love of
Never had an outage. I have 50 MB service, as my wife works from home and I do a lot of
my work while at home, too. Totally forgot about putting Ooma ahead of your router,
but it doesn’t seem to matter.
I am considering switching my phone service with Comcast over to Ooma’s basic plan. I currently have Comcast’s(Xfinity) bundled phone, cable and internet package. When I get my monthly Comcast bill, it does not break down the costs of the phone service part of the package, so I do not know exactly what my savings would be if I were to switch over to the Ooma plan. Is there a way to find out what the cost of my phone service actually is? Thanks for your help!
I wouldn’t even try and calculate or find out if I were you. I guarantee that Ooma will be cheaper over the next 6-9 months and will only add up to more savings over the long term. I wouldn’t delay.
If you really want to find out, then I’d call Comcast for an exact amount. They need to provide that too you even if the service is bundled.
I’ve been using Ooma for just over a year now as our main home phone, and we’ve been very happy with it. It replaced our $45/month home phone bill with a $4.50 monthly charge for tax only (for 911 service I believe, correct?).
The only issues we’ve experienced was when we were on a slow DSL connection at our old house, when we were trying to stream netflix and talk on the phone – we would have big delays, audio breaking up/etc. My guess is that setting up Ooma before the router would have helped to alleviate that. We had it hooked up after the router, and after updating some settings in our router to give priority to VOIP traffic, it improved quite a bit.
Since we moved houses we upgraded our internet connection and we haven’t had a single issue since. Made moving our phone much easier to the new house, just plug it into the internet connection and we’re set! It’s also nice for folks like my in-laws who spend a lot of time out of state in Florida or other warm locations. You can bring your home phone with you on the road!
Nice stats there. I currently have the OBi110 Voice Service Bridge & Telephone Adapter that I use with Google Voice, which is currently my office line. I actually haven’t set it up yet, but I chose it over the OOma because of the costs involved. OOma is absolutely rock bottom cheap for what it offers and I’ve spoken with others who really love it, too; however, the OBi110 was something like $35 and Google Voice is 100% free (in most cases), so I thought I’d give it a test run.
There are rumors out there that Google is getting ready to pull the plug on Google Voice, but until it happens, it’s one the best “second line” options available.
I’ll let you know how it goes!
I had the OBi110, and quite honestly it worked only some of the time. I had continual problems with one-way voice, even after a lot of troubleshooting. When it worked, it was great, but there was no telling “when”. The only quasi-solution that worked was to put the OBi in the router’s DMZ. No thanks! I bought the Oooma instead with the basic service. After close to 2 years with the Ooma Telo, I am really pleased about the simplicity of the setup, quality of the service, and stability. Porting my number was annoying, but that was a one-time thing. The service is not perfect. Once a call was dropped during the conversation, and another time the other party still heard ringing while I answered to several seconds of silence. Not bad, considering the savings. I do hope the Telo lasts!
Thank you for this timely post, I’m working on convincing my wife to switch ISP’s away from the local phone company and to get a VoIP phone for our home-phone (we have young kids and want something besides cell in case of emergency.) I convinced her to cut the Satellite a few years ago once I proved that Roku was easy and could do most of what we wanted, hopefully Ooma will be the Roku for the phone.
Does this work if you need a fax machine? Can ooma support faxing.
I can fax with Ooma. Going on three years of great service and savings.
Ya I’ve faxed a number of times and it works just fine.
I switched after reading your review last year. I haven’t had any problems at all! My bill is usually $4.00 and something for the tax each month. Thank you for the information.
Betsy – I can’t tell ya how encouraging that is to hear! We often times think that our reviews fall on deaf ears, but it’s so great to hear a follower actually using some of our recommended products. Thanks Betsy for following us, and continuing to read our money saving reviews!