[Staples] [BestBuy.ca] [Amazon.ca] Ooma Telo VoIP Home Phone Service $80 + $5/$10 per month. Save hundreds of $$$ each year

fongo one any unlock version?

Nitecrawller wrote: ↑ Hi, I was looking at the magicjack website and it looks very easy to setup...49$ and first 12 month free then 39$ yearly to renew...do you know how much it cost to port home phone number...currently with virgin home phone and paying 20$ a month...was looking into ooma but magicjack might tempt me even more....my mom has ooma and calls are very clear how is magicjack calls?

thanks

I think it is $20 USD or something around there. Magicjack does nickel and dime on anything extra. A Canadian number is $10 USD per year. Find out all the costs, and judge the total cost from there.

Magicjack is as good as your internet. It is probably good enough, but there are no guarantees. If your internet is good for other VOIP services, that chances are good it will be good enough for Magicjack.

Best feature of Magicjack that no one else does at a good price is to be able to forward to most numbers in North America.

Thanks OP, I went to staples and got it price matched. While I understand there are cheaper alternatives like VOIP.ms, I wanted to get something that works without much fuss out of the box for my not so tech savvy parents. Setup took < 10 minutes and it works really well so far. Also much cheaper than the Bell MTS phone line my parents have (~40 a month with no caller id/voice mail or nation wide calling). I'll have them test it for the next few weeks before I do a final port over, so far they can't tell a difference.

AhmedK005 wrote: ↑ Thanks OP, I went to staples and got it price matched. While I understand there are cheaper alternatives like VOIP.ms, I wanted to get something that works without much fuss out of the box for my not so tech savvy parents. Setup took < 10 minutes and it works really well so far. Also much cheaper than the Bell MTS phone line my parents have (~40 a month with no caller id/voice mail or nation wide calling). I'll have them test it for the next few weeks before I do a final port over, so far they can't tell a difference.

That's why I post.
That makes me Glad.
One less Bell line at a time...

I have been trying to decide what service I should migrate my home phone to, from Ooma. The price is good. But recently the Ooma line has been down more than 70% of the time. Worse there is no indication it is down. I have it set to fallback and call my mobile number. Recently that has also stopped working reliably. Just recently a notice that popped on on my Ooma for a new voice mail. I called in there where 10 brand new voice mail. I had checked voice mail less than 4 hours ago. So wow, I think someone really wants to get ahold of me. But no, it turns out all 10 voice mails where 5 days or older. I had ones going back up to a month. No notification when they arrived. No phone rings. No backup calls to my cell phone. And voice mails did not show up when I manually called in to check my voicemail.

So incoming calls are not working reliably. Forward to cell phone not working reliably, and voice mail is not working reliably. What is left? Well outgoing calls. Only most of the time, people have a hard time understanding me on the HD3 digital phones. So that is not working reliably either.

At this point I'm thinking I should just port to a company that does reliable call forwarding, and forget all about having the actual physical home phone.

facebook259 wrote: ↑ I have been trying to decide what service I should migrate my home phone to, from Ooma. The price is good. But recently the Ooma line has been down more than 70% of the time. Worse there is no indication it is down. I have it set to fallback and call my mobile number. Recently that has also stopped working reliably. Just recently a notice that popped on on my Ooma for a new voice mail. I called in there where 10 brand new voice mail. I had checked voice mail less than 4 hours ago. So wow, I think someone really wants to get ahold of me. But no, it turns out all 10 voice mails where 5 days or older. I had ones going back up to a month. No notification when they arrived. No phone rings. No backup calls to my cell phone. And voice mails did not show up when I manually called in to check my voicemail.

So incoming calls are not working reliably. Forward to cell phone not working reliably, and voice mail is not working reliably. What is left? Well outgoing calls. Only most of the time, people have a hard time understanding me on the HD3 digital phones. So that is not working reliably either.

At this point I'm thinking I should just port to a company that does reliable call forwarding, and forget all about having the actual physical home phone.

I had similar problems (years ago) with ooma. Then I moved to FPL, much better. Not perfect, not great, good enough and much better than ooma (or what ooma used to be.)

• Ooma's HD codec is terrible. I think I had to call them to switch me to g.711 but then I got the delay problem, because back then they only have 1 server in the west coast.
• Ooma used to have 1 server, now... 2. Fongo/FPL and Voip.ms have many more servers than ooma.

facebook259 wrote: ↑ I have been trying to decide what service I should migrate my home phone to, from Ooma. The price is good. But recently the Ooma line has been down more than 70% of the time. Worse there is no indication it is down. I have it set to fallback and call my mobile number. Recently that has also stopped working reliably. Just recently a notice that popped on on my Ooma for a new voice mail. I called in there where 10 brand new voice mail. I had checked voice mail less than 4 hours ago. So wow, I think someone really wants to get ahold of me. But no, it turns out all 10 voice mails where 5 days or older. I had ones going back up to a month. No notification when they arrived. No phone rings. No backup calls to my cell phone. And voice mails did not show up when I manually called in to check my voicemail.

So incoming calls are not working reliably. Forward to cell phone not working reliably, and voice mail is not working reliably. What is left? Well outgoing calls. Only most of the time, people have a hard time understanding me on the HD3 digital phones. So that is not working reliably either.

At this point I'm thinking I should just port to a company that does reliable call forwarding, and forget all about having the actual physical home phone.

Is your Internet connection solid?
Have you tried contacting Ooma's customer support?
Maybe ask them to switch server?

So now that I'm leaving OOMA I computed my average monthly cost of OOMA over the last five years. Drum role please:

$22.50/month

OOMA itself is just about $5 per month. But if you are like me and have relatives in the US, you think you need OOMA Premium. That adds about $10 per month. Also keep in mind OOMA becomes your exclusive hardware provider. Over the last five years I had the initial OOMA purchase. Purchase of wifi adaptors (two different types), both failed. HD3 phones, which they refused to honour the money back guarantee on, or even basic warranty.

All the hardware I purchased from OOMA is going to electronic recycling. I cannot in good conscious try to resell any of this junk.

So no, I didn't save money with OOMA. I spent more. And initially the quality was great. But for the last year it has been so poor, I've been just waiting until I reached the flustration point where I'm willing to bin the over priced under quality hardware and move onto something else.

I'll probably use VOIP.MS for the next year or two. Then who knows. But it won't be with vendor locked hardware. I haven't finished porting the my phone numbers from OOMA. But even without that outbound VOIP.MS calls work. With the Grandstream DP720/DP750 combo the call ended up crystal clear. I tried high and low frequencies, and could not find any frequency clipping. Plus, it is an encrypted connection, so that is one less security concern. It makes the OOMA seem like two tin cans an a string.

facebook259 wrote: ↑ I have been trying to decide what service I should migrate my home phone to, from Ooma. The price is good. But recently the Ooma line has been down more than 70% of the time. Worse there is no indication it is down. I have it set to fallback and call my mobile number. Recently that has also stopped working reliably. Just recently a notice that popped on on my Ooma for a new voice mail. I called in there where 10 brand new voice mail. I had checked voice mail less than 4 hours ago. So wow, I think someone really wants to get ahold of me. But no, it turns out all 10 voice mails where 5 days or older. I had ones going back up to a month. No notification when they arrived. No phone rings. No backup calls to my cell phone. And voice mails did not show up when I manually called in to check my voicemail.

So incoming calls are not working reliably. Forward to cell phone not working reliably, and voice mail is not working reliably. What is left? Well outgoing calls. Only most of the time, people have a hard time understanding me on the HD3 digital phones. So that is not working reliably either.

At this point I'm thinking I should just port to a company that does reliable call forwarding, and forget all about having the actual physical home phone.

This will be the trend as people having cellphone these days. Simply port your home phone number to Fongo.ca ($25 + tax) to keep your phone number for life and go to Fongo website to setup always forwarding to your Canada cellphone numbers (free unlimited forwarding calls).

This way we don't need VOIP adapters or reliable internet at home for our physical home phone solution...

X360 wrote: ↑ This will be the trend as people having cellphone these days. Simply port your home phone number to Fongo.ca ($25 + tax) to keep your phone number for life and go to Fongo website to setup always forwarding to your Canada cellphone numbers (free unlimited forwarding calls).

This way we don't need VOIP adapters or reliable internet at home for our physical home phone solution...

I'm come to conclusion unlimited calling is a waste. On average I have no more than 120 minutes per month on the home line. We all use our mobile phones for regular calls which have unlimited calls. The homeline is just for people we don't want give our mobile number, or for reaching the whole family, not just one particular family member. If that changes and I start using thousands of minutes per month, I might migrate to freephoneline.ca. In the past the reason I left voip.ms was a gradual reduction of quality. But I see since then they have added 5x servers, and have done other updates that may have resolved all those issues from 7 years ago.

Temporel wrote: ↑ Is your Internet connection solid?

Rock solid gigabit internet. I found however, Cogego's DNS servers are unreliable, so I switched to google dns.

Temporel wrote: ↑ Have you tried contacting Ooma's customer support?
Maybe ask them to switch server?

Many times. At an average of 1 hour per tech support call, and a solution that works less than a few days, I decided that is a waste of time.

facebook259 wrote: ↑ Rock solid gigabit internet. I found however, Cogego's DNS servers are unreliable, so I switched to google dns.

Many times. At an average of 1 hour per tech support call, and a solution that works less than a few days, I decided that is a waste of time.

It's puzzling how some people report problems with Ooma while some others say "easy" + "no problem".

You are obviously tech savvy as I wouldn't know how to check my DNS server: I'd like to check mine, may I ask how you do that?

TIA.

Now $98 from a 3rd party seller fulfilled by Amazon.ca

andersb wrote: ↑ voip.ms has a "per-minute" plan that is cheaper if you don't receive a lot of calls. its just the DID cost per month (so lets say $0.85 in most / all cases), incoming calls @ $0.009 / minute and outgoing calls at $0.005 / minute)

Keep in mind VOIP.MS is priced in USD, and those prices you listed do not include E911. If E911 is essential for you, then VOIP.MS simply is not the cheapest.

However, there is a huge amount of flexability in VOIP.MS you do not get with any other service. And the number of servers they have running have grown significantly. So the days of having a phone outage because their 1 Toronto based service is out and the Ottawa based server is unreliable have long since past.

BTW. OOMA is not pay only taxes. It is pay taxes, E911 fees, and other regulatory fees. It works out just a little more than $5/month. If you want to make calls outside of Canada, that is still either pay by minute, or pay another $120 + tax per year. No pro-rating if you cancel one day into the new yearly cycle. And no ability to tell them simply not to renew at the end of what you already paid for...

When I ported my numbers from OOMA, they did not automatically cancel my service like most VOIP providers do. I had to call in. First they offered me a discount on a new bridge, and then a bridge for free to try and get me to stay. I thought about accepting the bridge to sell and cancelling in another 30 days anyway. But that struck me as dishonest, so I just stuck to my plan and cancelled. As near I can tell there will be no refund of my balance for outgoing international calls or the remainder of my premier term.

Does FONGO include E911 for the price? If so it might be the best deal for those who need or want E911 on their home line.