Telo - 15 minute boot time

[arrowcatcher]

Besides the long bootup time, mine was also dropping offline for no obvious reason in midday. I connected a laptop to the HOME port and did a full factory restore. After that, it hasn't dropped off. This may be something to try.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Before I retired 2 years ago, I was dealing with such intermittent problems on a regular basis. The most common culprit was the Intel PUMA chip found in many of the popular cable modems, routers and gateways.
https://lookgadgets.com/articles/intel- ... dems-list/
There are other lists available. Intel attempted to fix the problem in firmware, but with only partial success. If you own a device that is on the various Puma chip lists, try borrowing or buying a device that doesn't use this series of chips.

[lmacmil]

I just rebooted my router and it took the Ooma 18 minutes to reconnect which is way longer than it took this morning when I unplugged it for a minute. Very strange. I'll have to try that factory restore. Are there instructions on how to do that on the Ooma site? I assume that doesn't erase the contacts, right?

[arrowcatcher]

I found with numerous trials that the bootup time depends on the time of day. At 6am, my Ooma reboots in ~4.5 mins. But it consistently takes 2-4X that long in midday. Check it out. I kid you not. I have 1Gbps fiber broadband, so that's not the bottleneck.

Instructions for accessing the Ooma box are here:
https://support.ooma.com/home/accessing ... s-settings

[arrowcatcher]

I don't have any contacts in my Ooma box, so I honestly don't know if a factory restore will erase them. Good question.

[arrowcatcher]

It looks like contacts are not stored in the box itself but are synced with your MyOoma account.

[Jeff Liebermann]

What can possibly go wrong? At 07/13/20223, 12:30pm, I decided to run another cold boot timing test. This time, it took 30 minutes to connect. Five minutes later, it disconnected. Why me? Why now?

Ooma's support web site at https://support.ooma.com/home/ proclaims; "All systems are 100% operational." Internet seems to working well. Traceroute to my.ooma.com looks very normal. my.ooma.com/dashboard/ shows no "news" which suggests a server problem. Nothing on downdetector.com and similar sites. My incoming calls are going to voicemail.

I just tried another cold boot. After 20 minutes, still no connection. Time for me to do something else and hopefully Ooma will have arisen from the dead before I return.

[arrowcatcher]

Have you tried a factory restore lately? That fixed it for me.

[arrowcatcher]

I shut down my IT room and restart daily. Maybe all these Ooma power-off shutdowns damage its file system after a time, necessitating a periodic factory restore. Been doing this since before getting my magicJack in 2008, and it's never had negative effect on that device, so I figure the same with Ooma. Not only that, there are also regular OhmConnect fake power outage events for Amazon gift cards. Most people likely leave their Ooma adapter on continuously. Ooma Telo may be a flaky design, also having a high parasitic 3 watt power consumption. I'm getting real unimpressed.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Have you tried a factory restore lately? That fixed it for me.

No. I haven't done or needed to do that since I bought the Telo. Also, I think you mean "factory reset".

It wasn't an Ooma related problem. When I returned 6 hrs later, my Telo was still comatose. We experienced an unplanned PG&E power outage yesterday, which has the irritating habit of affecting electronic devices by changing single bits in volatile RAM. Sometimes, I don't see the effects for days. So, I power cycled everything on my home network and rebooted the Telo after each device. The Telo is running on DC battery power, which should have made it immune to power glitches.

The HP 1810-G24 (J9450) gigabit switch was the likely culprit. The switch is stuck on an ancient version of the firmware thanks to HP bungling the firmware download web page making it impossible to download the intermediate version of the firmware required before installing the latest firmware. The switch is running on the original version of the firmware, which is likely to be a contributory cause. The plan is to replace it with a smaller DC powered gigabit switch.

The Telo's 3 watt continuous power drain is about typical for a home router, which is what the Telo is inside. I measured the Telo AC power drain as varying between 2.7 and 4.8 watts depending on what it was doing. Ignoring the CARE discount, Tier 1 power costs me $0.334/kWh or $8.78/year. During June, I overflowed into Tier 2 at $0.417/kWh or $10.97/year.
https://www.calculator.net/electricity-calculator.html
If I had a several such loads, I might be concerned, but $10/year seems reasonable. My recent PG&E billing history:
http://www.learnbydestroying.com/jeffl/ ... ry-07.xlsx