VOIP OPINION

[Eagle]

Do you have a voip service? What does it cost you monthly? Are local calls free? Long distance state to state? I am thinking about dropping phone service and going with voip. Your opinion?

[Percival P. Cassidy]

I already had cable Internet service and added an Obihai OB202 VOIP box (maybe $50 or so on sale) and have phone service from PhonePower (approx. $60 for a year with a discount coupon, I think).

Free local and lnog-distance within the US. Not sure about Canada. No complaints.

Google Voice now works with those Obihai boxes and is free.

Perce

[Harry Butz]

I'm rather fond of ooma.com as are millions of other consumer reports subscribers.

[bobm3]

After decaded and decades of paying the old phone company $75-100/month, I finally bit the bullet and purchased a Magic Jack ($35 and walmart), connected it to my internal network and plugged in my cordless phone base and have had trouble free voice now for over a year. Call for the entire US and CA are FREE and each additional year is only $35 which works out to $3/month. Yep, just like the phone company.

Had I known it was this good I would have switched years ago.

[M.L.]

Until a few months ago I was a longtime user of Localphone VoIP. All incalls are free and so are 800 number outcalls. Other outcalls are

1¢/minute within the US. However, it also costs $1.00/month for an incall telephone number.

Getting a Google Voice number to use with Hangouts is totally free for US, Canada and Mexico. Installs on most smartphones and computers.

[trader_4]

On Tuesday, October 27, 2015 at 8:07:52 PM UTC-4, Harry Butz wrote:

+1

I tried MajicJack and Nettalk and wouldn't touch either with a 10 ft poll. Fortunately MJ I was able to return to RadioShack. Nettalk I had for a year. Serious problems with both in terms of support. Neither have a voice phone support number, relying on emails and/or chat windows. I found MJ support via chat available, but totally incompetent. Nettalk, chat line is all backed up, they push you off to open a trouble ticket online, then they never respond to it. Check out Amazon for ratings there by customers and you'll see NT really, really sucks. Among the problems with NT, while for a month or two it was fine, it then started going into red light mode at least once a week. Until I cycled the power, it was out of service.

So, 6 months ago I switched to Ooma. Very satisfied. It's been reliable and they have real phone support that answers when you call. I had no trouble getting a real person on the line and the person sounded like they were US based. With NT ad MJ, IDK where they were, but the chat was in broken English. Ooma service is "free", but you have to pay for the device up front and monthly taxes and fees. The taxes/fees run me $3.75 a month. The box they were selling for $120, but they have sales where it's been $100, probably will again for the holiday season. You can also buy new or used ones on Ebay. The service includes unlimited US/Canada, unlimited Ooma to Ooma anywhere. They have international calling by the minute. And they have a smartphone app that lets you make or receive calls from your home # on your smartphone via wifi. I found the smartphone app voice quality and reliability to be far superior to the similar apps that MJ and NT offer. If you make a lot of calls, beware the other players. All of them claim to have "unlimited" residential usage, but they all really cap you at some number of monthly minutes and don't tell you about that except in fine print in the contract. With Ooma it's 5000 mins, something I'd never hit. I did manage to hit the NT limit of 1500 mins one month and then they just cut you off with no warning, service goes dead. When I signed up for a year, the limit was 3000 mins and they changed it a few months later, with no notice. Also, while the NT/MJ types offer discounts if you sign up for 3 yrs or whatever of service, I'd never do that or at least not until you're really sure it works for you after at least a year. Ooma also offers a premier service, for $10 a month that includes a lot of features like conferencing, call forwarding, etc, if any of that is something you need.

Another issue is porting numbers. All of the above ones charge $20 to $40 to port your old number in if you want to. Otherwise you can pick a new number, in some cases you can get a very local one, in others it may be another town in the state. How much that matters, depends on you. Also, I think MJ was playing a game where they charge you to port your number out if you want to leave and take it. From what I saw, it's questionable if that is even legal.

But I would look at Amazon at reviews on whatever you are considering. Wish I had thought of that before I started.

[Eagle]

Eagle expressed precisely :

Thanks to everyone for their view on voip! I will most likely go with ooma,

Eagle

[Frank]

Sounds like a good deal.

Wonder how you get your land line number switched to ooma?

I remember it was somewhat of a PITA to switch a land line from Verizon to Comcast VoIP.

I kept a 2nd land line for business use but it is connected to a FIOS box in the house. Verizon had replaced our deteriorating copper with FIOS a few years ago. They still retain pricing and charge for extra services like caller ID. Stuff you get for free on Comcast.

[Eagle]

I use verizon now, and am not happy about the cost. Internet, TV and phone costs $220.00 per month, and That is just too much. Fiber optic interenet access is good, but is it worth the expense?

[sms]

I use an Obihai 202 with RingTo. There is no cost for RingTo but they require you to sign up for E911 service with a separate provider and that costs $12 per year. So essentially I am paying $1 per month.

I looked into Ooma but it was a lot more expensive, even for the basic service, than RingTo and Obihai. The appeal of Ooma is that one company is providing both the service and the hardware, but the Obihai was not that difficult to set up with RingTo.

The Obihai also works with Google Voice and there is no requirement for E911 service, though it can be added separately.

RingTo does not charge a fee to port your number.

One annoyance, or it could be a benefit, is that the phone will often ring once or twice before RingTo catches a robo-call or junk call. There was also a time when tones were not going through to systems with "enter your PIN" but now it works.

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Our first experience with VOIP was when we ported our AT&T landline number to T-Mobile's no-longer-offered T-Mobile@Home $10/mo. add-on to our cell-phone plan. That seemed to work fine, but we were unable to keep it when we switched from a prepaid cell-phone plan to month-by-month.

We then ported that number to Google Voice (with the Obihai VOIP box). This was possible because our number now counted as a cellular number; I don't know about now, but then only cellular numbers could be ported to GV.

Then for a period of several months GV became unusable with the Obihai boxes, and it was at that time we got the PhonePower service. We still have the GV number as a "public" one that forwards to the PhonePower number, which we give out to very few people; outgoing calls show up as the GV number too. Everything works fine.

Perce

[clare]

Up here in Ontario Canada, I have used MagicJack - which gives north america-wide free calling and local numbers are available in most places, but no porting of numbers in Canada although they have been promising it for about 5 years. Cost, over and above the cost of the device is something like $18 per year.

I bought an OOMA box for home - porting the number cost $39.00, monthly charge is $4-ish and free long distance anywhere in Canada.

Phone voice quality is good. Occaisionally I get an echo - but no more than on my cell (actually gnerally better)

[trader_4]

The Ooma basic service is ~$3.75 a month. That's what I'm paying. Depends on what your definition of a lot more expensive than $1 is I guess.

[trader_4]

You just request Ooma to port it over, which you can do online. I think they charge $40 to do it.

One thing to be aware of is a problem I ran into when trying to port with MajicJack. Only a single, basic line can be ported. In my case I had distinctive ring with a second number set up on my Verizon landline. I had used the second ring # for a fax in the past, but hadn't used it in so long that I didn't even think about it. So, I put a port request into MJ. Their system accepted the port request and a few days later, it came back that they could not port it for the above reason. OK, so you'd think that would be easy to solve. It was on the Verizon side. I just had them put the line back to the basic service. Of course that also cost me another month service on Verizon. So, then I go back to MJ and try to put the port request in again on their system and now their system won't accept that number to port. It just said "this number cannot be ported", where previously it had accepted it and tried. Clearly this is a MJ issue. I wasted a lot of time in chat with MJ support and all they have were idiots, chatting in broken English. No one could escalate it, address it, etc. That's when I took the thing back to RadioShack.

So, if you're going to do a port, make sure you don't run into that problem.

[Frank]

Every year with Comcast, it is a renegotiation to get back to initial offering prices. I understand you can do the same with Verizon.

Our neighborhood has access to both and as mentioned I have both lines to my house.

My neighbor across the street will switch services if one will not oblige him with reasonable prices. I might do it but wife does not like the hassle. Verizon constantly bugs me to take more than the phone. I often respond to ask them with a VoIP connected phone, why don't I get full VoIP service. Also tell them I will take their initial 2 year offer if they guarantee for life. Waste of my time doing this.

[sms]

I got tired of all the monthly fees.

I dropped DirecTV and put up an antenna. TV is now free. We don't miss the 700 satellite channels, most of which were junk.

I dropped the DSL and landline.

I got 25 Mb/s Comcast service for $40 per month (plus taxes and fees) and that includes basic SD cable and On-Demand for network shows and one SD box. No DVR.

I got an Obihai 202 for VOIP service and ported my landline to RingTo. $1 per month.

Our life is no worse. I can't watch my college football games at home anymore, so I have to go to a local bar where the alumni meet to watch the games. More fun anyway, if only the bar would learn how to pour Guinness properly.

Ooma isn't a bad deal, but it's still expensive compared to other VOIP providers.

[clare]

How is it expensive?? I pay $4 per month for E911 service and "access fees"

[trader_4]

I raised that point previously. I'm paying $3.75 a month for Ooma. If anything, you have to wonder how these companies can make money and survive. It's not expensive in monthly cost relative to MJ or Nettalk. Both of those are ~$35 a year. Also, some of them play games, eg, they charge an extra $20 a year for a "vanity" number which means if you port your existing number in, they hit you not only for a one time port charge, but also for $20 every year.

Ooma eqpt is more expensive upfront, ~$120 vs ~$40, but it's also a much better service, with real phone support and if you decide you want to switch people are selling them on Ebay and recovering half of that upfront eqpt cost.

[Eagle]

Question...what about security? Is there an issue with security you need to know about?

[Eagle]

That is what I am concerned about. I don't want to deal with phone spam or email spam. Gmail filters span nicely, but filtering phone spam is dificult. [Or is it?]