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Review by CloaknDagr 
UPDATED: 123 days ago
member for 6.1 years, 88 visits, last login: 112 days ago
 San Pedro,Los Angeles,CA
 $8 per month (12 month contract)
 about 1 days
 "Full control of my own telephone system, very economical."
 "It's VOIP, took a little tweaking to get my firewall set up for max. performance."
 "Excellent, excellent, excellent."
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(ratings match consensus)
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I've been using my Ooma for about 3 months or a little more as I write this. I love my Ooma. I was paying AT&T about $70 a month for my previous single line business connection. Ooma charges for premier service only, you can get the basic one line service and use your own answering machine and if you do, then Ooma is free after the initial purchase of the core system which is around $200. They let you have the premier service free for 60 days and at the end of that I decided I wanted to keep it. That's $100 for 12 months or about $8.33 a month if paid annually, which I opted for.
This gives me a private line and my business line which I ported over from AT&T. I have a two line phone at my desk and it's great having my own telephone system. I can put the business line on "do not disturb" during my non-working hours but I can still make phone calls from it at any time. I gave my private number out to friends and family which makes me reachable at any time, though if you wanted you could put that line to 'sleep' too.
I'm not using a home router, I'm using an actual firewall appliance on my network. The Ooma devices are behind this firewall. It took a bit of tweaking and a few calls and emails to tech support both for the Ooma and the firewall to get it all dialed in for maximum performance but it was well worth it. I'm an IT consultant and a reseller for this particular firewall brand so it's great advertising for both Ooma and the firewall when I tell clients what exactly I'm talking to them on. Several of my clients are small businesses that could benefit greatly from the savings and security of this configuration.
I guess the point I'm trying to make above is that this can be made to work even in a very secure environment. Had I known a little more about the engineering of the Ooma it would have been easier still. My only real complaint to date is that the literature and manuals are all sort of dumbed-down making it difficult to acquire in-depth technical information. While this is a negative on my part it's a serious positive for most users as setup is very simple and anyone could be talking within a few minutes of plugging this in. Even with input from tech support I ended up doing some trial and error. no big deal but I did bug my sister a lot with phone calls of the "how does this sound now" nature.
Everything on my network is plugged into UPS's so the only thing that can take me out of service is an ISP failure of some sort. I'm on Cox so that's never been an issue for me at this location, they've never been down that I'm aware of in the 7+ years I've had the service.
I would highly recommend this to anyone provided that you are otherwise happy with your ISP. The 'multi-ring' feature simultaneously calls my cell phone when my business number rings so if for some reason I had an Internet outage I still have communications as I get good cell coverage here. Multi-ring is part of the premier package so that's another reason among many that I don't mind paying for the premier service. I just turn my cell phone off when I'm in my office.
I LOVE my Ooma!
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