Top positive review
86 people found this helpful
Ooma First Impressions
By TrueGreen on Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2016
My main reason in moving from POTS (Plain Old (Landline) Telephone System) to Ooma (VoIP) is to BLOCK those annoying nuisance calls. With this in mind I intended from the start to get the Premier service over the Basic. I knew right up front what I was doing. This whole topic was made very clear to me by the Ooma website. As to the website, it was very helpful in explaining how I could integrate Ooma into my situation and to explain what I needed to get it started. This took hours, not minutes, because this was all so new to me. But, after I had spent the time, all the necessary information was right there on the website. When the product arrived all the time spent beforehand was well worth it. It made installation and set up go quite smoothly. I've only had Ooma a few days and it is not yet totally integrated into what will be my former landline system. I am in the process of having my landline number ported. In the meantime I purchase the HD2 handset so I could begin to use Ooma and to use as my personal phone when my present cordless phones are connected. Activation went very smoothly with one hiccup. The instructions that came with the Telo were very easy to follow. The hiccup came as I went thru the online activation process. It would not accept my credit card (part of the activation process). I tried several times with different cards. I ended the process thinking that acivation was not successful. I called Ooma Support and they were very patient and helpful. It turned out that activation was succesful, but the credit card was not showing. They stayed with me while I repeated the activation process on another browser. This did not work. They then told me how to log into my account online and insert the credit card information. Everything was a success and I was very happy with Customer Service. I later went thru the online process to Port my landline phone number. When completed, I wasn't sure that I had done this right. I used the online Chat service and they confirmed that they did not get this order which was all I wanted to know. I thought I knew what I did wrong and repeated the process online. This time it was successful and I got immediate confirmation. Ooma tells you that it could take 3-4 weeks for the number to be ported. It is already scheduled to be done in a week. I decided to use Linx to connect my present cordless phone system to Ooma. Setting up Linx was very easy and went according to the enclosed intructions. I haven't connected my cordless phones yet. I'm waiting till my landline phone number is ported. I purchased the HD2 handset to use to get used to Ooma while awaiting the number port. I also want it as a private phone for my own use. I don't exactly like the feel of the buttons, but it seems fine. I did have a problem where the batteries went dead after a few days. I called Customer Service. They thought the problem was with the batteries that came with the unit. They quickly offered to send a whole new handset (for free exchange), but I opted to just buy a new set of name brand AA rechargable batteries for $10. This was the problem. Again, good Customer Service._______NOTE: Since I wrote this I found that the new batteries also weren't charging. I accidently solved this by unplugging the charging cradle from the PLUG end (it didn't help to unplug from the cradle end). So basically I am totally pleased. Everything is working fine. Setup was very easy. The phone sound quality is fine. The whole process of going from POTS to Ooma has been painless. Customer Service was great. My one bit of advise is to put in the time studying what needs to be done to get the system up and working before you open any boxes. Depending on your understanding it could take hours. The website has everything you'll need to know. That time spent is well worth it. ADDED NOTE: The porting process went very smoothly. It took 6 days. I then set up my home phone system using both Ooma HD2 handsets and my original cordless system that is probably 15+ years old. I used Linx to hook up my non-Ooma cordless phones. I've actually liked the way with which the Ooma phones work in my setup that I've added more of these than I had originally intended. I also used Linx to attach a Medical Alert system. This was all so easy to do and worked out extremely well. I ended up with a few very minor things that I couldn't figure out. In these cases Ooma Support by phone and chat resolved these very quickly. Now I'm just waiting for the silence of blocked nusance calls. In summary, starting with deciding on which VoIP to go with right thru to getting everything set up, I am very impressed with Ooma. As a bonus I got a great customer service rep at my original landline carrier and she made sure my other internet services, minus the phone, stayed in tact and that the full cost of what I was paying for the phone was removed. IMPORTANT: If I hadn't contacted my original landline provider's customer service I would only have saved $5 off the cost of the bundled phone. The customer service agent advised me to move internet and tv to a different bundle and I thus saved $30. She also set it up as an extension of the original contract so that I wouldn't have to pay a termination fee on the original bundled services. Update: Have had Ooma for about 2 weeks now and NO MORE NUISANCE CALLS, which was my main reason for making this change.
Top critical review
79 people found this helpful
If you don't like talking on the phone, Ooma is for you.
By Diogenator on Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2023
I switched to Ooma because AT&T jacked up our monthly payment by 57%, so I bought the Ooma Telo device (c. $60) and paid Ooma to have our landline ported (c. $40), just to get a monthly bill around $6 (for assorted fees and taxes) instead of $118. I forgot the aphorism, "you get what you pay for". The first problem was that I couldn't set up the Telo because it was a used device and still registered to someone else, so I had to wait a day or so for Ooma technicians to kill the old account so as to make it available to me. I connected our landline's RJ-11 jack to the Telo, not a difficult or arcane process at all. I give the WiFi signal an A (5 stars) because the Telo was cat-7 cabled to my router and so was never a problem. I give sound quality a C (3 stars) in that the voice on the other end sometimes would crack a bit, though it was never seriously garbled. I give tech support an F (1 star) in that the Ooma corporation has chosen to outsource its support services overseas to folks who have learned English in school but are not native speakers and hence suffer from heavy accents and complete ignorance of common American idioms (such as "on the ball", "the last straw", "let someone off the hook", "hit the spot", "wrap my head around it", and so on, though I don't recall any particular ones that I may have let slip [as in "let slip"!]). I remember one lady repeating the word "spawhm" (rhymes with "Tom") before I realized she was trying to say "spam" (rhymes with "ham"), though I can't recall the context in which that term came up. Another transliteration (from Tagalog?) is the term"this one", as in "I will help you with this one" or "You have this one" or "this one will be used", employed by every support technician with whom I spoke. This one what? General issue? This particular phone call? One facet of my problems? Asking for clarification was generally met with silence as the poor technician struggled to answer what they understood me to say. I must have called their support line at least a half dozen times. Dismiss me as a racist if you must, but I stand by my extreme frustration engendered by such linguistic difficulties. It's a lousy business model that the Ooma corporation apparently doesn't mind perpetuating. The main purpose of my calls was to try to just switch to Ooma Basic, which is all that I signed up for. It turns out that when you join, you're automatically given Ooma Premium free for two months, for us the main problem with that being voice mail. All messages went into some Ooma server instead of to our home phone. To retrieve messages we had to call our own number FROM our own number and wade through a couple of menu levels to hear the messages. My wife especially did not appreciate the learning curve, much less the hassle every single time. One Ooma support gentleman was just shy of rude in telling me, in essence, there was no way in hell Ooma was going to get rid of the two-month premium service. I got the impression that it was impossible for "support" personnel such as him to effect the change, so there was no way to escalate the problem higher so an actual technician could make the switch to Basic service. My asking to speak with his supervisor did not improve his disposition, nor did he connect me. Obviously the customer has no right for that level of service. But that wasn't the killer. It turns out that the Ooma telephone system has a track record of dropping calls. As one may surmise, we discovered it the hard way. So I searched online and it seems that at one time Ooma was routinely dropping calls after 15 minutes. I ensured that I applied whatever the fix was (I no longer remember it, probably because the human brain blocks trauma), but calls still got dropped, for us after anywhere from 13 to 18 minutes. I was in a back room of our house when my wife's screams made me think she had cut off her hand or something similar. But she had simply graduated from frustration to raw, unadulterated rage with her current dropped call. I was afraid the neighbors would think I was killing her since a continuous tirade of 4-letter expletives don't carry through walls as intelligible. I love my wife and have no interest in divorce (though it may have been on her mind), so I canceled our Ooma service and went to another carrier (definitely not AT&T) who, by the way, ported our telephone number for free. Ooma may be a good company, but in my opinion they have to address some serious service issues, both support and technological, if they wish to be attractive to potential customers.
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