No more landline

An old phone

I've reached the limit of my patience with the family landline.

I am usually annoyed with the phone, given how intrusive an unexpected phone call can be, unlike an email, text or instant message that you can respond to when it is most convenient for you. Granted, there are times where people need to reach you in real time, emergencies and time sensitive requests where phone calls make sense... but most people use phones for calls.

I personally use Google Voice, giving me one number that can ring both my cell phone and any other phone I would like to ring (as well as my current Gmail if I'm at a computer). I think cell phone technology has reached the point where I'd be perfectly happy for my wife and I to only use our cell phones as our only lines but she has a legitimate point: if we have babysitters or relatives watching the kids while we aren't home, there isn't a way to call emergency services if the need (God forbid) arises. So a landline is necessary.

Unfortunately, landlines are leftovers of a bygone era. Landlines are locked into the 19th century and there are better solutions available. I kept track one typical week of our phone usage. We make on average, one call to my parents, one call to my wife's parents, and a last one to her Grandmother. Add a few more miscellaneous calls to friends (long distance) and our average bill was around $45 per month. During this same time period, for every call we made (or received) from people we know, we would receive 6-8 calls from telemarketers. This is where landlines fail immensely. There is no way to provide intelligent instructions about who can reach you, when they can reach you, or what to do once they have called you.

Ooma Base

I decided it was time to move into the 21st century and put technology to work for me. Enter Ooma. Ooma is a voice over IP (VOIP) service provider for home users (rather than commercial grade offers from Cisco) and has a lot of nice features. First, you purchase the Ooma gear for $250 or $200 if you shop around. Ooma Basic service is free and provides all the basic typical services of phones today. Ooma also offers a Premier Service that has much more advanced features for $120 a year if they appeal to you. Some of these features include: multiple lines, anonymous call blocking, blacklists, online voice mail, call forwarding and others.

The way this device works is, rather than have dedicated phone service (in my case, Comcast Digital Voice), you have the same voice signal sent out over your internet connection as data. In this way, Ooma can offer unlimited* local and long distance calling. Given these costs, I expect to break even on this service in around five months.

Ooma Handset

I've had the service for about a month now, after a week of reasonable testing we decided this was a perfect solution to reducing yet another monthly bill and ported our home phone number that we've had for 10 years to the service. We've been very happy. Happy enough so we also purchased the Ooma branded handset, which operates via bluetooth connection to the Ooma base station. Since these devices are designed to specifically work together, you can leverage all the features of your Ooma service from either device, unlike a traditional phone plugged into the base station alone.

So what are the drawbacks? So far, we haven't experienced any. One possible complaint arises mostly from poor internet connections that have either poor latency or packet errors. The former often results in a "delay" in conversations and the latter could result in dropped calls. We haven't experienced either problem. Another possible problem is existing house wiring; our phone line enters the house in our basement and is then wired throughout the house from there. An optimum location for the base station would then be in the basement, where all the house outlets can connect to it. However, this isn't exactly the best location for your voice mail indicator and controls. We solved this by connecting our two existing phones to the base station (which resides connected to a switch on our entertainment center) and adding the Ooma Handset in the kitchen, near the entrance of our house and traditionally most used phone location. That gives us three phones, which is more than enough.

Even given some of these drawbacks, the service adds so many features compared to our old phone line for one up front cost that will save us a lot of money over time. I'm a happy customer and would recommend it to anyone with even a small amount of technical knowledge.

One last comment, so far we haven't purchased the Premier package (new customers get 60 days free to try it) since this was a tool to save money over time, I didn't want to sign up for a yearly fee despite some very appealing features. I found pages such as this helpful to compare the basic vs. premiere packages.