August 24, 2007
By Jeff Goldman
Setup
The initial setup process involves running connections from your cable or DSL modem to the Ooma box, and then from the Ooma box to your computer or wireless router—as well as from your phone jack to the Ooma box, and from the box to your phone.
Depending on where your broadband modem, wireless router, phone, and phone jacks are, that can be a challenge. In my case, it involved running a lot of long cables under carpets and around doorways. In the instruction manual, the company suggests either doing that, or using HomePlug networking to bridge the Internet connection instead.
Once all connections are set up, the next step is simply to power up the device itself. It provisions itself almost instantly, and the basic Ooma service is up and running. Instead of your normal dial tone, you hear a smooth musical dial tone when you pick up the phone that indicates that you're on Ooma and can therefore make free calls—but otherwise, it works just like normal phone service.
There's an unfortunate gap in the setup process, though: Provisioning takes 24–48 hours, during which time you've got free nationwide calling through Ooma, but no online voicemail access or second line.
In my case, that created an interesting challenge. Because the order to cancel my AT&T voicemail service hadn't yet gone through, some incoming calls still went to my AT&T voicemail, not my Ooma voicemail—but I no longer had access to the stuttering dialtone or voicemail indicator light on my phone that would tell me I had a voicemail message. As a result, I found myself having to unplug my Ooma box every hour or so to make sure I hadn't missed any voicemail messages in the interim.
Of course, that's a temporary problem during the one- or two-day provisioning process—and aside from that, the service worked reasonably well.
I called a few friends across the country to test the service, and the quality was good. Other reviewers have said the voice quality is better than PSTN—it didn't seem better to me, but it didn't seem much worse. Still, each friend I talked to did say they periodically heard some digital jitter on the line that would briefly interrupt the conversation.
I had another problem that was harder to pin down—I would frequently get a busy signal when placing a call, even if it was to a number that I knew had voicemail or call waiting—and if I unplugged the Ooma box to make the call directly, it would go through right away. It's hard to say definitively what would have caused that, but it was certainly frustrating—and like the voicemail issue, it forced me to plug and unplug the Ooma box, and disconnect and reconnect cables, on a frequent basis.
Power concerns
Then a much more significant problem appeared. As I continued to make phone calls, I discovered that my call would drop immediately if I sent a file to my printer over my home network. At first, I wondered if the call was somehow being disrupted by the network activity, but the folks at Ooma's support line quickly determined that it was a power issue.
And they were right. I live in an old house with ancient wiring—the lights throughout the house flicker when the washing machine runs, and the air conditioner at times causes the lights to dim—and that was apparently too much for Ooma. I soon found that the printer wasn't the only culprit: calls also dropped when my air conditioner cycled.
To their credit, the folks at Ooma reacted quickly. As company product manager Alex Gurevitch put it in an email, "Unfortunately, our first generation hardware does not support homes with 'brown outs' very well. Our second generation hardware, due to come out early next year, will address this problem entirely." Gurevitch immediately sent me a replacement power cable, which rectified the problem.
And the other features are certainly fun to use. Most notably, when you receive a voicemail, the 'Play' button on the Ooma box blinks to alert you. You can then check the message in a myriad of ways: by pressing the 'Play' button on the box itself and listening to it as you would on a home answering machine, or by calling into the voicemail service from your phone handset, or by checking it online. It's not revolutionary, but it's a nice range of options.
So will that, along with the second line functionality, the swanky design and (of course) the free calling, be enough to make Ooma a significant competitor to established services like Vonage or Skype? The look of the service, both online and in the design of its equipment, is impressive—and so it may ultimately come down to how it's marketed. It's a slick toy, and its coolness could certainly help it succeed. But with so many other options out there for free nationwide calling, $399 still feels like a very high price to pay.
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