Ooma Forums

I just bought an Ooma Telo but I have a feeling that I have made a mistake. What I want is to port my landline # over to Ooma so that I can use all the features. But to make my wife happy, I must have Ooma use my trusty landline for 911 service. The my.ooma.com control panel has a lot of caveats about using the landline connection. The cool stuff and landline connection seem mutually exclusive.

Can I port my landline # over to Ooma to get caller-id, forwarding, blacklists, etc. and still have it use a connected landline for 911?

thanks!

Porting your number will cancel your landline. It will no longer be available.
Ooma provides 911 service, you don't have to have a landline to get 911 service.

If you must have a landline for 911 service, get a new number with basic service (no regional or long distance calling plan) from the landline phone company and don't give the number to anyone.
Keep the landline as a separate phone system independent of the Ooma system.
That sounds like a lot of money for a phone line that may never be used.

Okay, after porting my number to Ooma, the landline will be canceled. Makes sense.

If I subscribe to a new, basic landline service, can I connect it to Ooma for the purposes of 911 only?

dferg wrote:Okay, after porting my number to Ooma, the landline will be canceled. Makes sense.

If I subscribe to a new, basic landline service, can I connect it to Ooma for the purposes of 911 only?

You could connect it but the only time it would be used is if your internet connection was down.
That's why I recommended keeping it completely separate from Ooma.

I 2nd that. If you have a cell phone, you can use that as backup for 911 if internet, power out.
If you really want to keep a basic landline just for 911, then keep it separate from Ooma and plug a non powered corded phone in.

Note that if you plug a land line into the "wall" port of the Telo, that line needs to be provisioned to work!
I thought the same way until I tried, the the Telo reset/reboot when the land line was called. Just got the confirmation from Ooma support today.

Note that if you plug a land line into the "wall" port of the Telo, that line needs to be provisioned to work!

Actually, no. It does not seem to work that way. Their support reps got completely confused when I tried to ask that question. However, from experimentation:

I switched my account over to a real Ooma # (no "landline integration") but left the landline plugged into the Wall jack on my Ooma Telo. Everything works great in this configuration. I can use the Premium services, everything goes out and comes in over Ooma, etc. If my Internet goes down, outgoing calls go out over my landline! And, as expected, incoming calls on the landline are ignored. Perfect. The only bad thing is if power goes out, I get no dialtone whatsoever--no landline fallback there. I'll have the Telo on a UPS so this won't matter.

Anyway, thanks for the responses, guys. Maybe I won't be returning after all!

dferg, my understanding is that with Telo, when internet is down, whether in landline integration mode or standalone mode, phones connected to Ooma should revert to the landline dialtone. I thought this meant incoming calls from the landline would ring the phone connected to Ooma as well. Is that not the case?

Look for the landline pass-through section: viewtopic.php?t=9245#p64442

From my experiment, I can confirm that, when configured standalone, the Telo will completely ignore incoming calls on the landline. Outgoing calls go out Ooma unless the Internet is down--in this case, calls go out the landline. If the power is out, you have no dialtone whatsoever.

dferg wrote:From my experiment, I can confirm that, when configured standalone, the Telo will completely ignore incoming calls on the landline. Outgoing calls go out Ooma unless the Internet is down. If the power is out, you have no dialtone whatsoever.

Ignore incoming landline calls even when internet is down?