Discount ooma Core VoIP Phone System with No Monthly Phone Service Bills

We looked at ooma when it first came out, but at $450 it seemed too expensive for us at the time. Now that ooma has a new business model and our ATT bills have gone up, the numbers made more sense. With only $200 for initial cost, and $100/year if we wanted the Premier services, we could try for a while and see if it worked. Our phone bills were typically $70 per month or more.

Here's the logic we used:
1) local phone service with CLID, CW, etc. is costing us $30/month. We'd want to keep a basic landline for 911 just for a while, but it does seem as thought high-speed internet services are becoming as reliable as the telephone system (congestion issues aside). We'd probably drop those costs to $15-20 per month.
2) National long-distance is costing us $15/month, and would be free via ooma
3) We're on an international plan with ATT that gets us per-minute prices comparable to ooma, but costing us $5/mo.
Overall, we'd probably save $35-40 per month on ooma. The initial cost would take us 5-6 months to break even, and with Premier, we'd need another 2-3 months per year. So the first year would save us only 3-5months worth at $35-40. In the second year, it gets much better.

So -- now that we decided it's financially viable, we had to check out ease of use. There are many discussions on the web around various limitations of the service. Probably the biggest concern is the distributed termination concept originally announced by ooma. Personally, I think they had a great idea there, but it certainly had it's risks, and I don't believe anyone can build a device that will 100% identify any security threats. With more hunting, I found announcements from ooma that their local termination was no longer used. Fully reassured, I decided to go for it.

Installation and registration were incredibly simple. The Premier trial is a nice way to learn about other services. Initially, we started with a local line connected to the hub, but since the voice quality is outstanding on ooma, we've decided to move our old number across and get a new local number for 911. That also allows you to take advantage of the Premier services more fully. We did not originally intend to get a second ooma number, but now that it's available to us, we're starting to see how it could be useful. We're going to put a second line into the guest room.

Overall, I couldn't be happier with the service -- very user friendly interface and really good voice quality.

The only addition I'd like is the ability to use Bluetooth headsets or direct digital connected phones with ooma. It's a shame to have an analog connection for your home phone which then does A/D conversion for the DECT wireless link. Voice quality should improve slightly with the new "telo" basestation announced at 2009 CES. Hope it gets Bluetooth too!

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