Telo - 15 minute boot time

[arrowcatcher]

Hi Jeff, we met in another forum way back talking about capacitor ESR. This time it's Ooma. I've had magicJack since 2009 and decided to look at Ooma after dealing with the lousy mJ tech support over a connection issue.

I've had a new Telo 2 from Amazon for some weeks. It has random long boot times between 4:23 - 16:25. The mJ reliably starts almost instantly. Finally started to seriously wonder what gives, especially since the Telo has spontaneously gone offline a few times and then rebooted itself, a severe no-no.

I connected a laptop to the HOME port and shut off DECT. Also did full factory restoration. It still has randomly long boot times but hasn't dropped off since then. I power off everything nightly, but the Telo wasn't located direct line-of-sight. I didn't look into it until the spontaneous drop-offs. Now I've relocated it up front so I can see its light and the delays. I have reliable zippy AT&T Fiber 1000 and an Arris BGW210 router in Scotts Valley.

In case my Ooma doesn't work out, I finally decided to renew my mJ so now have both. Won't need to do Premier with the mJ being far cheaper, adequately reliable, and having more features. Ooma did give me a very cool number that was formerly at a folded business. It's cooler than the one I ported to mJ years ago. Now I get to directly compare Ooma with mJ in real time. I have two landlines and a Google Fi cell and like to tinker.

[arrowcatcher]

Dunno if there were other temporary factors, but doing a full factory restore may have resolved the issue. Ever since then for 4 days, boot times are consistently about 4:25.

[Jeff Liebermann]

Very good. I just measured my cold boot time at about 4 min 30 seconds. That's tolerable, but nowhere near acceptable. If my cable modem and router can boot and connect to Comcast in about 1 minute, Ooma should be able to do the same. I've been tempted to setup WireShark to monitor network traffic to/from the Telo. I suspect that it recovers as quickly as my other routers, but is then doing something and possibly failing which might be causing an unusually long and sometimes erratic boot delay. Yet another project.

Like almost everyone in the forest, I have a generator. For extra power protection, I installed a 5VDC battery backup from Ooma.
https://www.ooma.com/telo/home-phone-wi ... ry-backup/
Not the best, but good enough. I've been slowly converting all my electronics to DC operation and eliminating my pile of marginal UPS's. Everything will eventually be running on 12VDC. For 5VDC devices, such as the Ooma Telo, I have 12V to 5V step down converters. Something like this:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/385679663550
19VDC devices, such as my Asus RT-AC66U routers is still a problem.

If I loose internet connectivity for more than about 45 seconds, and the Telo still has power (thanks to the battery backup), it takes 38 seconds for the Telo to reconnect. I consider that very acceptable.

You indicated that you have a Telo 2. I'll assume you mean a Telo Air 2. It probably doesn't have the same firmware version as my Telo 1. However, it doesn't hurt to check. Mine is 93638035. Dial *#*#001 and it will announce the version number over both the phone and the speaker in the Telo. It's probably somewhere on the various screens:
http://my.ooma.com/dashboard
but I couldn't find it.

Good luck.

[arrowcatcher]

I have a Cyberpower 2 kW UPS, and the Ooma is on that. My dedicated ATT fiber link goes straight to the central office so it doesn't go down in power outages like Comcast used to. I have a DIY solar battery BU I use for more extended outages. It must be manually connected. I have 4 UPS's, the big one and 3 smaller ones scattered around. It works out OK.

The Ooma has an annoying continuous 3 watt parasitic power draw, which is 26.4 kWh/year. The little mJ doesn't give off nearly as much heat and draws 1 watt.

My Telo Air 2 has the same firmware as your Telo. Thanks for the verification by phone instructions. I got the Air version in case I needed to fiddle with a WiFi connection. It does both 5 and 2.4 bands.

The 4:25 bootup time is acceptable for me since that only happens once a day on startup. The mJ starts almost instantly however. After the factory restore, the Ooma has been reliable. With Internet disconnection, the Ooma restarts in less than a minute.

So it looks like I'm all set now.

[arrowcatcher]

Maybe the bootup delays are related to time of day? I get 4:20-5:35 mins.in early morning and consistent 9-10 mins.in midday. Flaky.

Yesterday, my Premier trial expired. Do you have Premier? Have to see if I'm actually inconvenienced. VM notifications are important for one thing. My mJ provides numerous features including texting and email notifications for much less $$. The best thing about my Ooma is the cool phone number I got, but I can move that.

[Jeff Liebermann]

I would normally suggest that the extra long boot delays might be due to the internet being busy, but with your AT&T fiber connection, that shouldn't be a problem. However, there might be congestion along the route. Try measuring your ping delays, running traceroute, generating some download and upload traffic, and see if there is a noticeable deterioration in boot times when the system is busy. If you can find the name or IP address of the Ooma authentication server, try ping and traceroute to it and see if it becomes constipated. I once had to troubleshoot a similar time related problem and found that the office was backing up their collection of desktops to a cloud server, all at the same time. You might also try monitoring your own traffic using MRTG or rrdtool.

In case you want to sniff the Ooma traffic, here are the IP port numbers for filtering:
https://support.ooma.com/home/advanced- ... ce-ports/

I've had Premier for about a year. There were some features in Premier that I decided I could not live without.
https://support.ooma.com/home/feature-c ... ier-basic/
I definitely wanted the various Voicemail features, call forwarding, enhanced caller ID, the Google Voice extensions, spam caller blocking and the various call blocking features. There were some others that I thought might be useful, but those are the one's that I actually use. The Ooma dashboard says I've saved $451 since April 2022. That's probably low since AT&T has raised it's POTS rates in the last year. I don't regret ordering Premier.

I had Future-Nine VoIP for about 10 years. I arranged for a really cool phone number. When I signed up for Ooma, I tried to move that phone number to Ooma. After numerous emails to their "support", I never received a reply. So, I had to abandon the cool phone number. Instead, I moved my AT&T POTS number to Ooma and cancelled both the AT&T POTS service and Future-Nine.

[Robek]

Dial *#*#001 and it will announce the version number over both the phone and the speaker in the Telo. It's probably somewhere on the various screens ... but I couldn't find it.

The Telo 2 web ui also displays the firmware version, at the top of the screen.

[arrowcatcher]

One thing I do know is that no matter what time of day on my fiber, the mJ always starts in seconds.

My cell, which is where most of phone traffic is, also rings my Ooma. I've now set the Ooma to have a longer voicemail pick up time, so the cell now always answers VM's. The Fi cell provides text transcripts and notifications, so I can live without those on Ooma. The mJ emails me notifications and VM recordings at no extra charge. As well, I have a 2-line cell phone since mJ also rings my cell via its mobile app. I do OhmConnect and am a real watt shaver. The Ooma 3 watt parasitic power draw is annoying.

The mJ costs $130 with a 5 year prepay ($2+ per month) so not saving any $$ with Ooma. It's been interesting to discover the comparisons. I didn't fully realize how good mJ is. Customer service can be a problem, but I see complaints about Ooma as well. I want a cell and 2 landlines. I'm definitely not ordering Premier despite all the nagging.

[arrowcatcher]

In light of my Premier trial expiration and in the interest of my 2nd landline, I've signed up for Vioply with a promotional code. Have formally requested a phone number port from Ooma. Will let you know how that goes. I'll temporarily have 3 lines. Vioply assigns a phone number to use pending the port process.

A power-off Telo reboot at 8pm just now took 9:24. It was 5:35 at 6:18am this morning.

Voiply does not charge for their box and has tons of features, including calls to Canada and 50 other countries. I have friends in Alberta and Hong Kong. Total Ooma charges would be about $16/month vs. ~$10/month total for Voiply with an annual plan. I'm out $100 for the Telo Air 2, but I've literally saved thousands with mJ since 2008 so I have a large virtual $$ kitty built up. I figured Ooma would be better than it is.

[lmacmil]

I've never timed it with a watch but my Ooma boot time is typically several but less than 5 minutes. Mine's been going offline periodically lately (I just posted about this in this forum) and sometimes stays offline longer than the boot time. I actually unplugged it today after it went offline for the 2nd time. I have no idea how often it's happening since I wouldn't know unless I'm sitting at the computer and can see it or if I tried to make a call and had no dialtone.