Great Experience with Ooma

I have two Ooma boxes and I have had great success with Ooma.  Ooma allowed me to drop from a $42 per month telephone bill to a $3.50 bill. Before I made my purchase, I read many reviews  (mostly negative reviews) so I knew what I was getting into. I then compared the negative reviews to my experience to try to understand why some people had bad experiences. From that, I have made the following recommendations so that you can have the best possible experience.

Before I show my suggestions, my disclaimer: I dot work for Ooma. I have no connection to Ooma other than being a customer. My good experience is no guaranty of your experience, so, don't blame me if your experience differs.

My suggestions:

A. If you want to keep your existing phone number, it will cost you $40 and may take a month to transfer the number ( during which time the number might not work). My experience took a week and I received notifications through the process. However, you should set your expectations correctly.

B. do not transfer your existing number until you have the ooma working perfectly. Let the Ooma run for a week or two and play with it. If you try to switch your home phone number while the Ooma is having problems, you could set yourself up for a nightmare.

C. Unlimited calling means less than 5000 minutes per month. If you go over, they reserve the right to drop your service.

D. Don't connect ooma to a wifi network. Wifi sucks to begin with so you will probably get bad calls. Connect the ooma to your home network using a cable.
E. Pay attention to how you plug the Ooma into your home network. For the simplest success, plug the Ooma into your cable modem and your home router into the ooma. If you decide to plug the ooma into your home router, make sure you don't pick a port linked to the uplink port and haven't made custom settings on your home router that might cause the ooma to have communication problems.

F. don't plug in the ooma until after you have went to the website an set it up. There is a simple to follow guide in the Ooma box that explains these steps but I can only imagine how many people don't follow it.

G. after unboxing and plugging in ooma, it could take an hour or two for the ooma box to set itself up and the ooma light to turn blue and ready to go. So, plug it in, walk away, and come back later.

H. There will be a call quality decrease. There are too many variables to tell whether the call quality will be acceptable to you, so don't ask. 

I. If you don't have a good Internet connection (6mb or more) you may have unacceptable quality problems.

J. If you type something wrong into the website during configuration, you will have problems. So, pay attention. For example, if you are moving your phone number and you don't type your phone number correctly, or, don't provide a copy of your bill for troubleshooting - you are going to have problems.

K. Do your best to do self service. I haven't had to contact the Ooma support, but most people who have contacted Ooma support for help are the ones who report the worse Ooma experience. I recommend doing everything you can before needing to call for help.

I hope these suggestions help make your Ooma experience a good one!