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Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Mon Aug 16, 2010 7:50 am
by TMRT
So...my hub is not functional any longer and 60 minutes of troubleshooting with tech support brought the ooma rep to the same conclusion. Since the warranty is only 12 months, and since mine is 15 months old, ooma wants me to pay their "reduced" rate of $199 for a replacement hub. If this is any indication as to the life expectancy of the hub, then I might as well just pay vonage, right? I am considering dropping ooma.

TMRT

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Mon Aug 16, 2010 9:29 am
by roadshow
That sux, but hopefully not all of the hubs are bad. Some people on this board have had their OOMA since 2007.

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Mon Aug 16, 2010 10:08 am
by Davesworld
This is the caveat of free for the life of the hardware.

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Mon Aug 16, 2010 11:28 am
by lbmofo
The way I look at it, ooma device working beyond 6 months ($40 x 5 + $40 port) is all $ savings to me. If 15 months, that means I already saved $360 bucks.

If you have Fry's near you, you can go pick up a refurb Hub for $169.99 now.

Just recently, you could have gotten the Core brand new from Radioshack and Fry's for that price but those windows come and go.

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Mon Aug 16, 2010 8:04 pm
by FreePhone
Oh man, my Ooma Hub had better not fail after only 15 months! Free service for the lifetime of hardware means nothing if the hardware is not designed to last.

But would the replacement Hub for $199, have monthly Federal fees attached to it? If so, that would be the straw that broke the camels back for me.

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Mon Aug 16, 2010 8:09 pm
by southsound
No, when you purchase your new ooma device you just call customer service and transfer your numbers - and your TOS - to the new unit. That means you can replace a hub with a hub or with a new Telo.

Many of the original hubs have been in use for more that 3 years with no problem. I would expect that early failure is rare but something that happens with a small percentage of any electronic device.

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 6:44 am
by joeed2
Also, keep the hub clear of other electronics so it can keep cool. I have mine sitting alone several inches from everything else so it gets airflow and keeps cool. If you stack it up with your modem, router, etc. so that it sufficates with heat, it might die an early death.

Also, I will bet sometime soon people will start canabalizing dead hubs to find out common problems. It might be something as simple as a burnt resistor, power supply, or something like that you can replace with parts from Radio Shack or the internet.

If it is totally dead. No lights or anything. Then it might have a bad power supply or some kind of bad power relay or fuse or something. Might not be the main board (brains) of the hub. If you fixed it that way and kept the same MAC address, you don't have to transfer service or anything.

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Tue Aug 17, 2010 9:28 pm
by FreePhone
southsound wrote:No, when you purchase your new ooma device you just call customer service and transfer your numbers - and your TOS - to the new unit. That means you can replace a hub with a hub or with a new Telo.
So if my Hub fails down the road, what happens if Ooma no longer has anymore Hubs to replace it with? First Generation Ooma's will be getting harder to find.

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Wed Aug 18, 2010 7:34 am
by southsound
FreePhone wrote:
southsound wrote:No, when you purchase your new ooma device you just call customer service and transfer your numbers - and your TOS - to the new unit. That means you can replace a hub with a hub or with a new Telo.
So if my Hub fails down the road, what happens if Ooma no longer has anymore Hubs to replace it with? First Generation Ooma's will be getting harder to find.
ooma has been very good about allowing a transfer of numbers - and Terms of Service to updated units. I guess you mean what happens if the Telo has been replaced by a new products? I can only assume ooma would continue to take care of us as they always have. But I think the Telo has quite a few successful years left!

Re: Ooma hub dead after 15 months! Ooma wants $200 to replace!

Posted: Wed Aug 18, 2010 1:28 pm
by ktwalrus
This doesn't seem right. The retail price for Ooma at Best Buy and Costco is $199. This includes the hardware (which is worth between $50 and $100) and unlimited calling forever. Ooma should charge only for the hardware replacement when outside the warranty period. That is, the charge should be no more than $100.

As an example, I signed up with cable internet over 10 years ago and the cable company provided me with a free modem. After about 5 years, the modem was acting slow (the internet speed had gone up significantly since the modem was made) and the cable company happily gave me another free modem. This summer, my connection speed slowly dropped from 30Mbps to less than 5Mbps. When the technician came out to diagnose, it turned out the free modem was dying and had high packet loss.

The cable tech installed another modem for me (a new model). I asked him how much the cable company would be charging me for the new modem (since I can buy the same modem for $50 on eBay) and he said it would be free since the cable company had originally provided me with the modem that failed. He said it wouldn't be right to have the company force me to pay to replace a failed modem that they had provided to use their service even though it had been 5 years!

As a new Ooma customer, I hope that they place a priority on customer service and not try to charge full retail for out of warranty replacement where the hardware is only part of what is included in the full retail product. You shouldn't have to rebuy the entire service just to replace a failed hardware part.