Ooma is a home phone, but it's something a little different. It's basically a home phone that you use over the internet, so you need to have high speed internet service to make this work.
There are other voice-over IP service providers that are offering home phone over the internet service too, but ooma is different. I've had Rogers Home phone for about six months now, it's an internet home phone that is virtually identical to the Ma Bell offering.
With ooma, you buy an ooma telephone set. I bought mine at Costco for $149 - that's about the lowest price I've found. For this price, you get the ooma telo box plus the wireless adaptor.
Here's what the ooma box looks like, with the wireless adaptor on top:
Since I have wireless internet service, the wireless adaptor picks up the internet connection. Then, I plugged my home phone INTO the ooma. Seems odd, like you should do it the other way, but not so.
Anyway it was that easy. I now have a huge set of features like call forwarding, call display, call privacy etc. My favourite feature is that I can play voicemail messages from the "my ooma" portal, and I can save and send the messages. I wish I had this a few years ago when I received my first voicemail message from Noah - it would have been super cute to have it saved and be able to play it for him when he gets older.
I also now have free long distance in the US and Canada, not that I make a lot of calls, but it was costing me about $20 a month for long distance.
For $9.98 a month, I have all the long distance, home phone line, fantastic features, etc. - it's wonderful and a huge savings off of the old telco packages! I am going to save a truckload of cash with this purchase.
LOVE ooma!
So glad you are testing all the cost saving technology, P, so we can reap the rewards of all your research.
ReplyDeleteYeah!