ooma Core VoIP Phone System with No Monthly Phone Service Bills Decide Now

I am a former Vonage customer (almost 4 years). I have been using Ooma for over a month now and I am satisfied with their VOIP phone service. However, as with my initial experience with Vonage I have similar points to make about Ooma:
- 5 stars for VOIP phone service
- 1 star for the online customer service; return e-mails very unreliable, almost non existent (I got a response to one of my three e-mails after 3 weeks without any apology for the delay) There is a reason they refer and encourage you to use Ooma forums for help.
- 3 stars for phone customer service; no follow up by calling back as promised. I reported a problem with placing an international call on one occasion (I could hear the other party but they could not hear me). Representative E. gave me a "ticket/case #" and said someone would look into the problem and call me back - never heard from anybody. Problem was somehow solved but I didn't get any credit back for several unsuccessful connections nor any explanation of what caused the problem.

As with all new technology, one has to be prepared and accept occasional glitches. I had serious doubts about continuing my 30-day money-back guarantee trial service with Ooma when on April 13, 2009 the whole system was down for several hours due to "extended Internet service outage" (I assume in California where Ooma operates). But there was no way of knowing what happened; tech. support phone line was just busy (there was no recorded message or any notification to be easy found about the problem). I could not log in to my account (my password was misteriously but only temporarily "changed" on that day, as a "side effect"?). Finally I went to Ooma Forum and dug out some relevant info on what happened. There were also a lot of angry posts from customers. This why you need to be aware of certain limitations when Ooma is in distress. The next day I received a generic e-mail from Ooma with apology, explanation and a promise that they had learned from it a good lesson and that they would handle such a situation better in the future. I hope so. Anyway, I have bookmarked the discovered thread in case I need it next time around. As of this writing they have two places for updated "Service Status":
http://forums.ooma.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=26
http://twitter.com/ooma_status

After porting my old number, I chose to share it between my home wireless phone system and the fax machine. Unless I decide to use the second/temporary number in the future, my Scout unit will stay in the original box. As with Vonage, such an arrangement with Ooma allows me to send and receive occasional faxes. The only difference now is that (before sending a fax) I have to dial first *99 followed by the actual fax number. When I expect to receive a fax, I simply switch my fax machine from Manual to Auto Receive mode, so it picks up the signal on the first ring.
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