product review

Voice over internet protocol (VOIP) is how you make phone calls through your internet connection and is a common way of ditching traditional land line service.  If you’re in the market for a VOIP solution or want to look at alternatives to your existing VOIP provider then this may be one option.

When I was looking for a VOIP solution I considered Ooma, Vonage, MagicJack and Comcast Voice.  I wanted a low cost, high quality, reliable connection and did not have any need for international calling.   I quickly ruled out MagicJack because it requires a computer be on at all times and that’s not very friendly to my power bill or the environment.

Vonage and Comcast offer a similar service for comparable prices.  Comcast offers their Triple Play service which combines cable television, internet and phone service in one package, but for me the package includes a slower internet speed than I have with them now and I the package deal is only really attractive for the first year.  Vonage seemed reasonable, but the monthly cost wasn’t better than Comcast.

The Ooma Telo on the other hand is a one time fee and has no recurring costs.  The device itself is relatively small and unobtrusive.  It’s a matte black finish and can be placed anywhere that you have a wired internet connection.  I keep mine in the living room and plug a cordless phone base station directly into it.  Ooma offers a handset but I uses a Panasonic cordless phone instead.  I opted to have my original land line number ported over by Ooma and they assigned a temporary number to my device while the port was happening.  Once the port was done the temporary number seamlessly transitioned to my original number.

The voice quality sounds like a traditional land line and I only rarely hear digital artifacts on the line.

The other features that Ooma offers are all accessed through their web based portal.  The portal gives access to listen to voicemail, see call logs and change settings.  I subscribed to a community black list of known telemarketers and have entered a few numbers into a personal blacklist of my own.  You have the choice of sending blacklisted numbers to voicemail or just having them go into the void.

In case my network goes down (we are talking about Comcast here) I enabled is call forwarding on outage.  When there are network problems and the Ooma device is unable to get online then all calls are forwarded to the number of your choice.  In my case I send them to my cell phone.

For voicemails I have them sent to my email as a mp3 attachment and can listen to them on my computer, cell phone, on the portal or directly on the Telo device.

Overall it’s been great and has saved me a lot of money.