It’s been about two months since I purchased and activated my Ooma Core Voip Phone System, I’m happy to report that it’s been working flawlessly! :good:
If you’ve been following along on my ooma progress in previous posts, you’ll see the numerous updates on the number porting process. Other than the half a day of hiccup during the completion of my number porting, ooma has been working with no problems for both incoming and outgoing calls.
The call quality has remained excellent, better than my original verizon landline! Recently, ooma added the ability to alter the ooma dialtone/chime within the lounge area so I just disabled it. It wasn’t really that annoying but I’d rather not hear it at all if I had the choice and since I didn’t need to make a call to customer service to do it, I just took advantage of the feature right online, very easy! :clapping:
International calling continues to be clear and trouble free for us calling China and Hong Kong. In fact, we’ve made several calls over the past 3-4 weeks since getting our international calling credit for activating ooma in January that I am confident to say that we’ve tested it out with great satisfaction. The rates are very good and I don’t see us even using up the entire $50 credit within the 90 day period. So far, we’ve made about 6 hours of international calling which is a lot for us and we still have over $43 bucks left.
Earlier I logged into my verizon account online to see what the final bill would be and to check if I could still log on. I was surprised to see a $6.53 credit due to us! My ooma premier trial ends in 3 days and I’m still up in the air about subscribing to the premier features. From my understanding, as long as I subscribe within the trial period, I would be able to get a reimbursement of my number porting fee which really means that I would get the premier service for $60 the first year verses $100 for each year thereafter. It’s tempting but I have found that we don’t really use all the features. I’ve only blacklisted two numbers so far but I wonder how often those two numbers are actually trying to call the house, haha and get the blocked message. I guess we shall see…if I get some extra money mysteriously show up for me in the next 3 days, then I will subscribe to it.
The newest “export to excel” feature for the call logs work ok. I’m not totally sold on the idea of having to export to a spreadsheet just to calculate my call totals but I appreciate the ability to keep record of my calls via excel. When you download the spreadsheet, it says for March but in actuality, it’s for all calls since activation which in our case was restarted from the time our number ported over because our login changed to our ported number verses the temporary ooma number. And within the ooma lounge, the call log keeps on going for pages and pages. We really don’t use our home phone that much so we just have 6 pages. I think it would be much better if they were able to split up the logs on a month to month basis and allow each month to be downloaded in excel separately.
For a household who uses their phone like crazy, you’d have to sift through 10, 15, or even 20 pages of call logs to see a particular date. If this continues the way it is for a year, it wouldn’t be very efficient to go through 100+ pages of logs to find call information for 6 months ago. I hope they will update that for the future and have the ability to sort out call totals within ooma lounge for each type of calls, whether it’d be incoming or outgoing or international or long distance, etc.
They are still working out the kinks and adding new features on an ongoing basis, I am confident at this point to say that ooma will be around for awhile…most definitely for me to recoup my initial investment which stands at $260 cuz of the number porting fee. Break even point for me based on my previous verizon $50.00 a month bill is scheduled for around July of this year….since we had to continue paying our landline during the number porting which took a little over a month. If I end up subscribing to premier, break even would be around September.
I am really amazed at how things came together. With finding ooma, taking the plunge to get it, realizing that I can cut back our verizon service during the porting time to a lower message rate service with caller ID, finalizing the number porting, flawless call quality with no interruption, and being able to cancel the verizon service and still get a small credit back. Not to mention the international credit from ooma which came right around the Chinese New Years when we make the bulk of our international calls…..and also venting here about my huge landline bill and wanting to cut costs on our utilities resulted in assistance from the wonderful gentleman with our cable tv/internet company helping to renegotiate our bill to a lower rate with the same service.
I must say that ever since then, my Broadstripe service has been running fantastically! I am amazed at how good the cable and internet service has been in the past month and a half. The internet has been consistent, I’m not getting the fluctuations in speed as I had gotten before nor am I getting the overnight downtime that would happen periodically throughout the month, this was important since I am a nightowl uses the computer mostly at night and into the wee hours of the morning. Even my flaky issue with my digital box seems to have resolved itself, maybe it WAS because of mercury being retrograde that was causing all kinds of havoc, who knows! It just all works now, everything just works, I’m amazed by how it all just came together.
I’m really amazed and grateful for how things have worked out…I’m saving about $100 a month just on home phone and cable, I’m sooo happy…the rest is smooth sailing from now on 
Next thing on the list to cutting costs around the house is a programmable thermostat. I had bought one a couple of weeks ago but it wasn’t the right type for our heater so back to the store it went. One day at a time :good:
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