Ooma Forums

Yes, you can plug your landline that has dialtone from another provider from the wall jack in your house into the wall port of the Ooma Hub or Telo. Then, if you were to lose internet connection or power, the Hub or Telo will fail over after about 90 seconds to supply dialtone from the wall jack to all the phones connected to the Hub or Telo

This is true for the hub, but not in the Telo. The circuit that provides this change over is not included in the Telo. It was deleted by design.

Wayne

Wow, I didn't realize that Telo didn't have this feature. I love this feature of the Hub as a fallback and just assumed that Telo will carry forward the functionality. Wonder why Ooma didn't think it worth to keep it ?

Let me clarify that. On the Telo, if there is a network outage, the landline will kick in. If there is a power loss, the landline will not. On the hub, the landline kicked in even when you lost power.

Wayne

I just wanted to make sure you are aware that you can have dsl without a phone line. That's what I have. It's called a dry loop or stand alone dsl. Unless you want landline back up then I think it's the way to go to save the most money especially if you want features like caller id. I subscribe to premier with dry loop dsl with qwest and everything works great. Not one outage since July when o purchased ooma. I also worked out a deal with qwest to only charge $30 a month for dsl to keep me as a customer. Just food for thought.

Quicksprj wrote:I just wanted to make sure you are aware that you can have dsl without a phone line. That's what I have. It's called a dry loop or stand alone dsl. Unless you want landline back up then I think it's the way to go to save the most money especially if you want features like caller id. I subscribe to premier with dry loop dsl with qwest and everything works great. Not one outage since July when o purchased ooma. I also worked out a deal with qwest to only charge $30 a month for dsl to keep me as a customer. Just food for thought.

I checked my DSL provider, and they offer dry loop, but only if you live in a Verizon area. I live in an AT&T area, so they don't offer dry loop.

I think after I drop caller ID, and go to measured calling on my AT&T line, I'll reduce my bill from about $32.50 to roughly $18 / month. (This includes taxes and fees.) Maybe I should shop around for internet that doesn't require a landline, and doesn't cost $18 more than my current DSL does.

WayneDsr wrote:

Yes, you can plug your landline that has dialtone from another provider from the wall jack in your house into the wall port of the Ooma Hub or Telo. Then, if you were to lose internet connection or power, the Hub or Telo will fail over after about 90 seconds to supply dialtone from the wall jack to all the phones connected to the Hub or Telo

This is true for the hub, but not in the Telo. The circuit that provides this change over is not included in the Telo. It was deleted by design.

Wayne

So what does that mean exactly? Was the switch to make the cutover when power was out too expensive, and therefore it was deleted on purpose (that is, it was not an accident) to save costs?

Or was it deleted because it is not a benefit, and does not support a viable use model, and therefore was taken out of the design because it simply did not make sense?

Save costs. According to Bobby B less than 15% of ooma customers keep their landline and the number was sure to decrease in the future. Not enough to justify the exta switch.

Wayne

I have a land line for my alarm system but it is in no way connected to my hub. There is a phone on the land line but the ringer is turned off since I have never told anyone what the number is and don't want to be bothered answering it to listen to Verizon trying to sell me FIOS.

I got the following bullet from Costco's webpage listing Telo:

Landline Backup Option: Be backed up during power outages or Internet outages to make 911 calls if you also choose to keep a landline connected to your Ooma Telo.

If I am reading this right, then landline kicks in both when their is a power outage and when there is Internet outage. I guess we just have to test it out. Will do it later today.

I tested it and the landline does not kick over when the Telo is un powered.

Wayne