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Ooma Telo VoIP Home Phone System
$139.99 + $5 Shipping
Condition: Refurbished

*DISCLAIMER* Wootalyzer! is in no way affiliated with Woot!, and this post may not always be here!

if you do choose to cancel your land line and go with this, what will your phone number be?

Is this better than Magicjack? This is more expensive.

We've had our Ooma for a little over a month now, and we love it. We switched to get better call quality than Skype. (And we did.)

They do charge $10/month for their premier service if you wants things like voicemail forwarded to your email.

stabnwswd wrote:if you do choose to cancel your land line and go with this, what will your phone number be?

The option to get a new number at no charge or keep your current phone number (one-time porting fee of $39.99 - if available to port)

I bought one of these last time around. Fantastic is all I can say. My bill each month is under $3.50. This is for the taxes that you must pay, but $0 for local and long distance.

stabnwswd wrote:if you do choose to cancel your land line and go with this, what will your phone number be?

You can port your number with Ooma. I believe it takes 2-3 months to go through. We use it at home and love it. Cost each month (in CA) is only for taxes and comes out to a little over $3

I've had one of these for about 8 months. You still have pay local taxes every month, but its not much (I pay a whopping $3.47 a month). Haven't had any problems with the service at all. Their premium service has some awesome call blocking features to thwart telemarketers as well. Very good buy at this price.

If your Ooma experience will be anything like mine was, you'll thank me for telling you to to not buy one and instead get an OBi110 that integrates perfectly with Google Voice (and has zero monthly fees... for now).

KyserSoze wrote:Is this better than Magicjack? This is more expensive.

Ooma works with the computer off, and you pay nothing per month (unless it's the premier service) except for the government fees.

Got it from Costco for over $200. So far, after 3 month of use, decent. Voice call is fine. Setup is okay, require some work (to determine to put it behind the router or in front of it), and the fax is a hit & miss. Some of the faxes are received while others never made it (even though my all-in-one said it went through).

I say if voice is most important, go for it. But if fax is vital, then be aware.

Oh, it is not free. I pay about $3 and change per month for taxes.

I have one. I paid $200 for it and it's worth every penny.

We initially had some voice quality issues but it was resolved when I connected it directly to my router with QoS turned on. Before, it was connected to a switch connected to the router and maybe that confused QoS setting. I don't know.

Faxing with it has been iffy but browsing the website, I learned that adding *99 prefix to a fax number should make it better. I haven't had to try it yet since I don't use fax very often.

Our Ooma works with our alarm system, although the website says it's not compatible. The alarm technician talked us into upgrading our control unit but I don't know if we were just upsold or whether that was actually necessary. We didn't pay anything extra as we were on month-to-month at that point so the price of a new control unit was waived with a contract.

All in all, it's a great little system. I think it has google voice integration and other host of features, but since it works so well as is, I'm not particularly motivated to tinker with it and therefore not all that familiar with the full set of benefits. But why look around when I'm perfectly happy with what it offers?

I'm sure there'll be some discussion about this Ooma system and magic jack and similar systems. They are all pretty similar but have enough variations. Ooma is for someone looking for the old POTS experience, something you set up once and have it work transparently with highest compatibility with fax and alarms. Magic Jack would be fine for someone in a dorm or a small apartment who has a computer on fulltime downloading bittorrent files or whatever. You just get what works for you. There's no better or worse in the absolute sense.

We switched from Vonage and haven't looked back. $15 for premiere sure beats the $35 we were paying Vonage (that's $10 worth of fees each month).

The only thing I miss with Ooma is not being able to have calls ring on Ooma before forwarding to another number. It's either ring all, forward without ringing on Ooma or forward on network outage.

Although Ooma is designed to work alongside your landline it can also be used without a landline. Hooking it up to my router and plugging in my cordless phone's base station took less than 5 minutes. After setup online I was making calls within 10 minutes. I am using the first generation Ooma and I choose not to pay for any advanced features. So for me after the initial investment I will never have to pay another penny for local or long distance calls. After using the Ooma for a few years I can honestly say that I have NEVER had any problems or issues with it. Probably one of the smartest purchases I have ever made.

Got one last time it was on Woot and it's probably one of the best recent purchases I've made.

As someone mentioned earlier, you can port your number for 40 bucks, but it doesn't take the 2-3 months claimed, mine took 8 days. There's a federal law requiring your current carrier to comply within a very short period of time to a porting request (24-72 hours I think).

Premier service is available for $10 a month, I don't bother with it, some may want it. When you sign up you get 60 days premiere for free to test it out.

Otherwise it's only mandatory government taxes per month, I pay less than $3.50 a month for phone service. As far as I'm concerned Ooma has already paid for itself since I cancelled my $35/month voice plan I was on.

Also voicemail is available not just via the Ooma box, but online as well which is pretty cool.

If you have multiple phone jacks, you only need ONE Ooma. Also the main distinction between this and magic jack, as far as I can tell, is that Magic Jack requires you to have your computer on 24/7, Ooma does not. If there's a power failure or internet failure, you won't be able to make or receive calls.

Definitely recommend getting one.

yes, ooma/telo is the real deal. Got one last woot and ditched Vonage, never looked back. Call quality is great, no hiccups whatesoever, and bill is like $3.47 a month as advertised. We even ditched cable internet in favor of Clear (wimax) and call quality is still fab. Great purchase.

Got ours from Costco for only $199.99 with the Bluetooth adapter....better value at Costco due to the full warranty and the 90 day return policy, in case the service isn't up to par in your area.

I own one of these from a previous woot, and I love it. The service is great I have never had an issue.

For me it only costs $3.87 a month.

It replaced my primary line and I was able to port the number over very easily.

It certainly is a solid product and service that I can recommend from first hand experience for over 5 months.

for those of you worried about bandwidth I have a meter on my router that measures the Inbound/Outbound total bandwidth and during the call there is a spike of about 350Kbps to connect then it levels out at about 100-200Kbps there are a few spikes now and then but noting more than 400. I normally use this on Fios 25/25 but i brought it to my Dad's house to test it on his > 1Mbps dsl connection and it still worked great.

I have only had a delayed connection twice and both times it was to a cell phone with bad service.

I highly recommend this I might even get another for my dad its that good.

Last time Woot had these, they sold out. I didn't check Woot until 10PM that time.

I got two, one for me and one for my mom. When i couldn't get an Ooma, I bought a NetTalk instead. The NetTalk has many problems, I hope the Ooma is better.

I'll add my experience to the positive reviews. I got one of these from Woot about a year ago, I left Vonage and I couldn't be happier. $3.53 a month for call quality that's as good or better than I got from Vonage. The cheapest Vonage plan is about $20 per month with fees and taxes so this purchase already paid for itself. Ported my number, too - only took about 2 weeks to get it. I don't have a fax machine so I can't speak to its fax performance. But for simple voice calling it's the real deal and highly recommended.

If you are interested in Ooma service, I suggest seeking out the older Hub over the Telo. With the Telo, you have to pay the taxes ($3-4/month for most), but the Hub has no charges, ever.

We got the original Ooma Core Hub back in 2009.
LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!

No More Phone Bills! EVER.

It's paid for itself($250) many times over!
Still works beautifully every day.
Go Ooma!

I have the previous version and the sound quality is fantastic -- even better than our regular landline. Everything works as it should and setup took only a few minutes.

The biggest issue with all these VoIP services (telephony through the Internet) is that the Internet has to be available. Although we Manhattanites (NYC) generally have reliable and consistent Internet coverage (i.e. no floods, hurricanes or earthquakes), street repairs knocked out my access yesterday and today for about 1-2 hrs each day. And I suffered massive withdrawal. So as long as you have reliable Internet, this is a good option.

What is the difference between this model and a "ooma Hub VoIP Home Phone Service" which as solder at a cheaper price?

Here: http://www.frys-electronics-ads.com/ads/2011/04/01/52894/Ooma-Free-Home-Phone-Service

Also got one last time on woot. I leave it in my network cabinet out of sight and set the OOMA answering machine rings to 6. It feeds my Panasonic DECT 6.0 cordless system with built in answering machine set to pick up at 4 rings.
I pay for the upgraded service just for the "blacklist" feature to keep the knucklehead telemarkers from calling back.

It works great.

The only thing that annoys me is that automatic email notification is part of their Premium plan. With MagicJack, I was sent an email with the voice file every time someone left a message. With Ooma, that only happens with the Premium service. Otherwise, you have to log on and manually download the file. I'm involved in several legal issues, and retaining these messages are important to me.

I used a Magic Jack for about 1.5 years and while the voice quality was pretty bad I rarely used the phone (and my computer was always on anyway) so it didn't matter. I stayed with Magic Jack until they forced the screen saver / monitor power saver to be disabled. They claimed this was because when the computer went to sleep it caused problems with the phone being answered. I tried to explain to them that I understood that and I wasn't setting the computer to go to sleep (or hibernate) but only the monitor. They wouldn't budge and I personally think it's because they want their horrible ads to pop up all the time.

Anyway I jumped over to Ooma around Christmas of 2009 and I have been 100% happy with it! My setup has the Ooma device behind the router since the Ooma's QOS settings gave too much bandwidth to the Ooma. After that was set up it's worked perfectly.

I use Google voice with this but I do not have the premium package. Basically I set the Ooma answering machine to pick up after 99 seconds so when someone calls in using my Google voice number, Google's voice mail will pick it up instead of Ooma and send me an email transcript of the message. Setting this up this way you will either have to dial out on the computer or call your Google voice number and use option 2 to have your Google voice number appear on the receiver's caller ID.

There is a lot of information online about this, but really if you use this phone a lot and want to use Google voice, signing up for the premier service might be something to consider.

A lot of people ask me about the difference between MagicJack and this.

- MagicJack requires that your computer be on to receive and make calls. Ooma is a standalone device, and no computer is needed. Just think of Ooma as a minicomputer that exists for the singular purpose of telephony.
- if you leave your computer on just for MagicJack, there is significant wear on the hard drive and waste of electricity. But if your computer is always on anyway, i.e. as a server, then it's not an issue
- Magicjack was great, but I gave it up because I do A LOT of mutlitasking, and have high bandwidth use for other apps. That resulted in VERY choppy calls. If your computer is not doing much else, MagicJack has very good voice quality, comparable to Oooma (althoguh Ooma claims to use something called HD Voice which doubles available frequencies)
- Ooma is a one-time investment (if you don't need the Premoium services) whereas MagicJack has a low monthly/yearly fee.

KyserSoze wrote:Is this better than Magicjack? This is more expensive.

I have both a MagicJack and Ooma. I can call anywhere with my Ooma, but when I try to call family in Wisconsin MagicJack gives me a recorded message saying that they do not have an agreement with the phone companies in this area so the phone call cannot be completed.

Also Ooma takes hardly any bandwidth for great reception. I can't be doing anything on the internet if I am using the MagicJack.

Needless to say the MagicJack will not be renewed.

Current Vonage bill = $26.50 mth
Ooma = $145 + $4 mth

Should pay for itself by Christmas!!!

I'm in.

A lot of people are concerned that Ooma can go bankrupt at any time. This is a concern because studies show that more and more people are giving up landlines in favor of cellular service. I wouldn't worry. The minimum monthly phone bill is about $40 for us NYers (we have to pay that much monthly even without making any calls ... all those damn unexplained surcharges!). At that rate, you'd make up the cost of this Ooma in about 3-4 months. So even if Ooma goes belly up in 4 months, you end up spending nothing. And I think it's safe to assume that Ooma will be around for at least several more years.

stabnwswd wrote:if you do choose to cancel your land line and go with this, what will your phone number be?

You can port your phone number to Ooma. Took about two weeks for mine to port.

Just one more positive voice:

I've used this model for quite a while now.

I ported over my # (maybe 8 or 10 day wait)
and never looked back at my landline.

Voice quality is very good.
Honestly, I wish I made more long distance calls...
I'd be getting even better value.

Big thumbs up.

p.s. I only took the leap because Costco was
standing behind it (they even made a promo
video for Costco.com)

This is a no brainer. Great product. Voice quality for me is crystal clear, even better than the voice over FiOS which this replaced.

Ooma Telo VoIP...what? is this even English? is it even a human language?

Great buy, works great. Purchased from Woot, and 100% satisfied. Ooma's customer service is fantastic.

Been using our Ooma service for almost a year now and couldn't be happier. We have the premiere service so we can block numbers we don't want (eg: telemarketers) plus a bunch of other features. Even with the yearly fee and monthly govt. taxes, it's still a lot cheaper than our old telco and we didn't have any features with them.

Porting took about 2 weeks to complete and the call quality is great. We use it with the Ooma handset which isn't a great phone but it serves it's purpose and allows access to Ooma features. The web interface is not too bad. It can be a little slow sometimes but no big deal. You can configure your service there, listen to voicemails and save them to your HD if you want and configure blocking, etc.

Overall I would give Ooma, it's service and it's equipment 4 out of 5 stars.

Always seems to be good helpful info in previous Woot sales forum discussions.

Previous Woot Mar 27, 2011

Previous Woot Jan 20, 2011

Previous Woot Oct 16, 2010

Does anyone know if this can be used for a small business? We have 5 employees using one phone number. Could this be used with a set of wireless phones or would you have to use the Ooma headsets (they limit it to 4)? Could 2 or more people be making calls at the same time?