Anyone using ooma?

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Hmmm. Wonder if that would have less echo than my cordless phones on a verizon fios phone. Odd thing is that a corded phone works perfectly and has no echo. The cordless DECT 6.0 phones have sometimes a horrible echo.

We (well, my wife, really) have had it for almost three years now. It works great for talking to people; she says the sound quality has always been fine. She very much likes the ability to simultaneously ring both the "Ooma phone" as well as her cell phone, as it pretty much means she'll never miss a call. I like the fact that it is a self-contained box that you plug "regular" phones into, rather than something than has to be plugged into a PC that's powered up 24/7.

It's a bit of a hassle to set up for FAXing -- you have to dial an access code first (*99) to tell Ooma to use a more "transparent" CoDec, and set the FAX machine to a lowish speed --, but after doing that once it works OK.

---Joel

Question and comment:

(1) Can you transfer your old land-line number to Ooma?

(2) I use MyFax, so I just E-mail a PDF to a specific E-mail address and the recipient receives a normal "FAX". Likewise my advertised FAX phone number just catches real faxes and then E-mails them to me. ...Jim Thompson

Probably. VoIP providers are, in general, covered by the same rules about number portability (both "to them" and "from them") that the traditional land-line providers are bound to.

I converted my wife's home-office business line over from a standard PacBell/AT&T land-line, to a VoIP line (using Vitelity) as the new carrier. There was a one-time fee for the porting (as is usual for porting), it went off without a hitch, and it's been working fine ever since. Since she gets few calls on that line, we opted for the "DID fee, plus a per-minute charge" rather than flat-rate... and we ended up paying about a third of what the landline had cost.

And, I live being able to blacklist known telemarketers via an Asterisk database... they get a "congested line" rejection and the phone never rings.

Yes -- or at least they claim you can; we didn't do so as at the time we didn't have any well-known number we wanted ported. Indeed, this was when we were in southern Oregon, and we specifically chose a Portland area code for our new number since that's where more of my wife's clients were located.

Ah, here:

That does sound like a better solution than the slightly-hacked Ooma approach. She only sends perhaps 1 or 2 FAXes a month, though -- if it were more MyFax sounds like the way to go.

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Yes, and yes? dedicated line for fax.