Our new ooma phone system arrived this week. Now we can say goodbye to our monthly phone bill. With the ooma phone, after you buy it, you don’t need to pay a monthly fee for the service.
We got an ooma on sale for $204 (which came with an iPod shuffle). After switching from Vonage at $21 per month, we should break even in 10 months. After that, we’ll have free phone service.
I didn’t know about the ooma phone until just last month, but it seems like a great idea. It makes me wonder what other services that we pay for monthly can be converted into a one time fee.
Have you switched over to ooma? If so, I’d love to hear about it!
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I’ve looked into the Ooma phone in the past and thought that the combination of Magic Jack and a cell phone was a better way to go.
What I like about the Magic Jack is that I can take it with me wherever I go. On the other hand, the Ooma is a nice dedicated device that doesn’t need a computer to run.
I’d be interested to hear about your experience with the Ooma. Perhaps it is time to look into it again.
-Athar.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:23 am
Good find, Madison. I’ll have to check it out if and when it makes sense to go back to having a home phone. We just run off cell phones now.
Thanks for linking to my book post!
November 12th, 2009 at 11:39 am
I have had Ooma for about a year now and it works as well as Vonage did.
Hookup was a breeze and porting my Vonage number was easy.
I have had no real problems, although there are times when call quality is not great – usually hanging up and calling again will fix that.
November 12th, 2009 at 11:48 am
Sounds interesting, but there are some extremely negative reviews on Amazon regarding their customer service, call quality, and their unadvertised 3000 minute a month call limit. Caveat Emptor!
November 12th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Vonage may still be the best way to go if you make many international calls. They have a plan for $28/month that includes *free* international calls to 60 countries. I’ve been using it for a couple months now and voice quality is good – never had to hang up and redial. Saving a bunch vs. my previous plan w/AT&T.
November 12th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
We’ve had ooma for some time now. We paid about $250 for the ooma hub and ooma scout. Our phone bill for local and long distance was almost $73/month, so the ooma paid for itself in three months.
My wife recently got an Iphone so we took $30 of the monthly savings back and diverted that to wireless, but we’re very happy with the ooma running over our AT&T dsl line.
November 12th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
We don’t even have a landline (old school or VOIP) at home. My wife and I just have our AT&T family plan, and it works great. I wonder what we’ll do when we have kids, though. Seems like you have to have something—maybe Google Voice would be a good option, though?
November 12th, 2009 at 8:38 pm
I’ve been using MagicJack for a about a year now and it has worked fine. There are some times that I have had to unhook it from the computer and plug it in again but it has been fine. Having purchased 5 years of service for $50, I’m happy.
Ooma is interesting though. Perhaps will give it a chance down the line…
November 13th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Just got one this week. Hooked it up, started the number port. But I haven’t really used it yet. I hardly use the telephone, and getting rid of $36/month will be great.
November 14th, 2009 at 9:45 am
We have had Ooma for over a year. Getting rid of the landline bill is fantastic. The nice thing about Ooma over MagicJack and/or Vonage is that your computer does not have to be on for Ooma to work – not to mention NO monthly charges at all!
November 16th, 2009 at 7:43 am
Madison, how do you like Ooma? Did you keep your landline number? I want to rid myself of a landline phone so I am very interested in your results.
January 16th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
@ ElleX: So far so good! We kept our number and it works great. I’m loving the free phone service.
January 17th, 2010 at 10:02 am