VOIP phone

[railer]

We use our TWC digital phone sparingly, and it's not worth the 50/month or whatever it is we actually pay.

We have cell phones, but I'd like to get some type of VOIP phone service...something that I can hopefully plug our existing house phones into. I like the safety and convenience of having phones in multiple rooms of the house, that's why I'm leaning towards keeping some type of home phone service.
It would also be nice to port our existing home number over to the new VOIP phone.

Any suggestions? I'm looking at the Ooma from Amazon...not sure what else is out there.
Thanks

 

[John Connor]

Hmm, Magicjack comes to mind. I did have a piece of software, but can't remember the name of it.

 

[RossMAN]

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2294873

We love our Ooma yes it's $3.50 a month in taxes/fees whatever but reliability and call quality are top notch.

 

[John Connor]

Very tempting, but I would need to use my thin client and if the power goes out and there's an emergency you're fucked.

 

[RossMAN]

Very tempting, but I would need to use my thin client and if the power goes out and there's an emergency you're fucked.

Yeah if our power and/or broadband goes out, we're fucked.

Cell phone backup FTW!

 

[Pardus]

Check out phonepower, costs $8/mo for a 2-year plan, tell them voipo offers the same service for $149, they will price match it.

They have a great support staff that resolved several quality issues, other voip providers could not fix.

cool features:
* android and iphone app that lets you use your cell phone to make call though there network to avoid using cell minutes, you can also check for missed calls and voicemails when your not at home.
* you can get an email anytime there is a missed call.
* can block calls online and i can download voice mails to my pc, lots of other features via online interface.
* fax catcher is cool, an inbound fax goes to voice mail and saved online as a file, no need to get a fax machine or pay for fax services.
* fail safe, you can have a calls routed to your cell phone if your internet or power goes out, this was a huge bonus for me. We lose power a lot in my rural area.

I would stay far away from vonage and magic jack.
Can't comment on Ooma, never tried it.
I had Time Warner's digital phone service for a while, it was $29.99/mo and getting someone on the phone for any support issue would take 30+ mins.

 

[Doppel]

I got Ooma 18 months ago. I love it. It's not as reliable as a "real phone" in that there are rare issues, like yesterday for some reason it wouldn't allow outgoing calls for a little while, but the issues seem to have been worse when I bought it.

I have recommended it to others and it's crazy that people still pay $30-40 for a landline they infrequently use when OOMA is around. Vonage is a non-starter because it's way too expensive.

 

[dabuddha]

I just got ooma and love it as well. I was looking into obihai but I don't think they have 911 service which is a definite no for me.

 

[rsd]

I have an ooma as well (yay for being grandfathered in for the old version and paying $0.00/mo!). Overall I can't complain. I like how it supports e911 (while magic jack doesn't). We don't use it a ton but for no monthly fee, it's paid for itself quickly and the call quality is very good.

 

[Murloc]

I like the safety and convenience of having phones in multiple rooms of the house

pro-tip: pick up your cellphone if you're moving to another part of the house.

 

[lokiju]

It always amazes me how few people seem to have heard of the OBi100.

Amazon link

It's $35 for the device and that's it. No other cost associated with it assuming you tie a Google Voice number only to it. You can actually associated 2 google voice numbers with it and it'll do a different ring for each line.

The thing works flawlessly. Just plug into your home internet connection via ethernet then hook the output to your phone either into your main distribution/splitter or by just hooking up a cordless phone system to it and having the additional handsets in the locations you want.

I use it for my job for the days I work from home and no one can tell I'm not on a land line.

The biggest downside is there is no 911 service with it if you use Google Voice only. It does work with a number of services though besides Google Voice and some of them do support the 911 functions though I've never tried them.

 

[jaedaliu]

When I called Sprint about crappy in house reception (aparently brick buildings suck) they sent me an AirRave (femtocell) for free, which has a phone jack and number. I'm not getting charged monthly, either.

 

[WackyDan]

I gave up on VOIP this past December after being an early adopter many years ago. The quality is way up, but still had reliability issues for us from time to time.

We dropped it mainly as it was cheap several years ago and basically became just as expensive as a traditional POTS line. With our bucket of shared cellular minutes, it just didn't make sense to have a dedicated home phone anymore.

 

[MadScientist]

Another vote for the Obi100. Had mine now for almost a year. Got it on sale for $29.95 shipped. No monthly fees, crystal clear voice, no dropped calls so far.

 

[LookBehindYou]

It always amazes me how few people seem to have heard of the OBi100.

Amazon link

It's $35 for the device and that's it. No other cost associated with it assuming you tie a Google Voice number only to it. You can actually associated 2 google voice numbers with it and it'll do a different ring for each line.

The thing works flawlessly. Just plug into your home internet connection via ethernet then hook the output to your phone either into your main distribution/splitter or by just hooking up a cordless phone system to it and having the additional handsets in the locations you want.

I use it for my job for the days I work from home and no one can tell I'm not on a land line.

The biggest downside is there is no 911 service with it if you use Google Voice only. It does work with a number of services though besides Google Voice and some of them do support the 911 functions though I've never tried them.

This. I use the same device with my google voice number. There is a service you can get to use 911 too. We have it and its great, cost $15 a year and even sends my wife and I a text message that lets us know if someone dialed 911 from our house. I think the service is through Anveo, I get an email whenever the phone goes offline due to internet outage as well.

 

[DesiPower]

I vote for any Google voice device, skype is also good!

 

[SunnyD]

lol, you people are wimps.

I pay $1.80/month + $0.01/minute actual usage for outbound calling via an ACTUAL VOIP provider, with ACTUAL SIP phones. And that includes E911, voice, fax-to-email, etc.

 

[Wyndru]

I'm looking at the Ooma from Amazon...

Ooma is very cheap, simple and reliable. I pay less than $4 a month. They can port your existing number over and they support 911. Their web interface (my ooma) is very useful for checking phone logs and they have built in voicemail that you can check from anywhere. The biggest advantage to me was how simple it was to get it up and running. They have only been out 2 times in the 4+ years I have had it, and they let you know on their website as well as twitter.

The last time I looked at the OBi, there were a bunch of steps to get it up and running, which isn't good for my family who wanted something simple. They don't want to screw around with getting a google voice number, configuring it to the device, setting up a service just to get 911, etc...and then there is always the chance that down the road google could start charging for the number.

Maybe that has changed since it's been a while that I've looked at the obi.

 

[amdskip]

OBi100 gets my vote too.

 

[MontyAC]

I have an ooma and an obi100, using on two different lines. Both are good.

 

[lupi]

I have the tmobile home service. I heard that some people sell those accounts but you can't start a new one anymore.

 

[railer]

pro-tip: pick up your cellphone if you're moving to another part of the house.

Really? So every single time my wife does anything in the house, she needs to remember to drag her cell phone along? To the basement, upstairs, in the attached garage, etc. I'd rather pay for the home phone service than lose that, which is why this thread was started. And I could care less about missing calls, it's the 1 chance in a million that there would be an emergency and she would actually need a phone that I worry about. That's the safety and convenience that I was talking about, that I'm willing to pay for.

And it's pretty sad that I don't even know what I pay for the phone, but TWC bundles our cable and phone together (I have RR billed seperately thorugh school). But I think our promo rate was $29.99/month, and I'm sure has gone up since then. I think we were paying around $112/month for phone/cable (just basic digital cable, no premium channels), so I think our phone portion of that had to be around $40/month.

Thanks for the responses. Ooma sounds pretty idiot-proof, so I'm tempted to pay a bit more for that up front. Porting my home number and having 911 service is important to me.

 

[makken]

Really? So every single time my wife does anything in the house, she needs to remember to drag her cell phone along? To the basement, upstairs, in the attached garage, etc. I'd rather pay for the home phone service than lose that, which is why this thread was started. And I could care less about missing calls, it's the 1 chance in a million that there would be an emergency and she would actually need a phone that I worry about. That's the safety and convenience that I was talking about, that I'm willing to pay for.

And it's pretty sad that I don't even know what I pay for the phone, but TWC bundles our cable and phone together (I have RR billed seperately thorugh school). But I think our promo rate was $29.99/month, and I'm sure has gone up since then. I think we were paying around $112/month for phone/cable (just basic digital cable, no premium channels), so I think our phone portion of that had to be around $40/month.

Thanks for the responses. Ooma sounds pretty idiot-proof, so I'm tempted to pay a bit more for that up front. Porting my home number and having 911 service is important to me.

Why don't you get a home phone that can link to your cell via Bluetooth?

 

[V00DOO]

I have been using Ooma for more than 4 years before they imposed monthly taxes and fees. I paid $99 for the Ooma system with zero monthly fees or taxes. It has been very reliable but it does get choppy at time.