Ooma Forums

I just bought an ooma Telo. So far I am happy with its sound quality. It is very good. But I do worry about unknowns because I have only 30 days to make the decision. After that I will get stuck with $250 equipment that would be useless if I quit, not to mention the trouble porting my phone number back to Qwest. So far, I have located the following fees:

1) Monthly taxes and fees. I checked. It seems I need to pay $3.47 a month.

Q: The reason I want to switch my phone service is I am tired of paying monthly $10.40 for all kinds of fees and taxes upon our basic $10.52 Qwest landline phone service that we rarely use (we mainly use cell phones). My concern is whether Ooma’s $3.47 taxes and fees amount is legal. Could it start charge me the same $10.40 taxes and fees once I have ported my local phone number to its service? Why could it collect different amount of fees and taxes?

2) The $11.75 fee (a year later).

Q: It seems this $11.75 “taxes and fees” is in addition to the $3.47 monthly “taxes and fees”. Is this correct?

3) International calling fee which includes 3 charges: Calling rate, Tax on every minute of a call and connection fee of 3.9 cent.

Q: I will stretch a little bit: As I understand, all of these fees are subject to change without notice which means in theory even if I have checked the rates just before making a phone call, I could still end up paying something else. My wife often makes an hour long international phone calls using a phone card. It could be a lot of money if rate is changed without our notice from 5 cents per minute to, say, 20 cents. So, does Ooma have a policy to give out a certain amount of time of advanced notice before a rate change?

4) I remember I read somewhere on Ooma websites says there is a tech support fee of about $20 per incident and $60 or something for an annual contract. I could not find that page anymore. What is this fee? Do I have to pay to get help from Ooma? It sounds a little odd to me. (I hope getting help here is free. )

5) If I do not buy prepaid calling credit, does it mean I can’t make international calls? Why should I buy the prepaid calling credit when Ooma has already had my credit card number? What can Ooma charge to my credit card anyway?

6) Any other fees I should be aware of?

Thanks a lot in advance for your inputs.

Welcome.

Look at this post; it talks about how some are gonna pay $11.75 per year and some are going to pay per month based on zip code.

Check out the "rates" page. Check out some more info along that line.

If you don't have prepaid balance, you won't be able to make international calls. The cost is calculated based on the rate at the time of the call.

On the long distance charge topic, there is the 3.9 cent connection charge if you don't have the international package and there is a 14.1% FUSF tax. This post has lots of info.

lbmofo,

Thank you for your help. According to Bobby’s post on your link, an Ooma customer only needs to pay one of two types of “tax and fee”, not both. My account says “You are required to pay $11.75 per year …”. So, I don’t need to pay $3.47 monthly fee . Please correct me if my new understanding of this issue is wrong. Thanks.

Could you (and other friends) help me clear other two issues? One is the $~20 fee per case for support. I am sure I read it somewhere on Ooma website. Is Ooma tech support (phone and email) free?

The other issue is the international calling rate. In fact, I wonder if Ooma email their customers newsletters or announcements anytime there is a fee and/or rate change, or new taxes coming? If it does, than that will be good enough for me.

Thanks again for your help.

You got it on the tax.

This page, you can see that unless you are an ooma Core customer (hub+scout) or you have premier, you'd have to pay for phone support, per incident or per year. Not sure about email support.

You can check this international rates page from time to time to make sure the rates/fees didn't change much on you by looking up the country you are interested in calling. Be prepared to pay additional 14.1% for FUSF tax and $0.039 connection fee (connection fee is waived if you have the international bundle).

My daughter recently (3 weeks ago) bought an Ooma Hub refurb from Fry's Electronics. We managed to get it activated OK (needed tech support to upload the MAC address), but now she has changed her mind and has decided to go with the Telo instead. I understand a call is required to Ooma support to swap the MAC addresses (essentially deactivate the old hub and activate the new Telo on her current account). I also understand that her current account and number will remain the same, but I have some additional questions:
1) The old hub requires a $3.47/mo RRF after the 1st month, and that's what we see when we look at her account online. The new Telo box says the fee will be roughly $11.75 after the 1st year. Does this mean after activating the new Telo, her account should change so that her RRF will actually be roughly $11.75 after the 1st year?
2) She currently has a number port in progress. WIll swapping out the old hub for the new Telo affect the porting process at all?

Thanks for any help.

fishhawk wrote:My daughter recently (3 weeks ago) bought an Ooma Hub refurb from Fry's Electronics. We managed to get it activated OK (needed tech support to upload the MAC address), but now she has changed her mind and has decided to go with the Telo instead. I understand a call is required to Ooma support to swap the MAC addresses (essentially deactivate the old hub and activate the new Telo on her current account). I also understand that her current account and number will remain the same, but I have some additional questions:
1) The old hub requires a $3.47/mo RRF after the 1st month, and that's what we see when we look at her account online. The new Telo box says the fee will be roughly $11.75 after the 1st year. Does this mean after activating the new Telo, her account should change so that her RRF will actually be roughly $11.75 after the 1st year?
2) She currently has a number port in progress. WIll swapping out the old hub for the new Telo affect the porting process at all?

Thanks for any help.

Are you sure the reburbished Hub requires a $3.47/mo RRF? My sister purchased and activated a refurbished Hub from Fry's last weekend. A credit card was NOT required to activate, which I assume would mean there is no RRF.

Fry's refrubs are Core refurbs? Not certain but CompUSA and TigerDirect still has Cores for sale and new too.

Fry's refurbs are just the hub; no scout is included in the package (at least not the one she bought). Looking at her account, it has a link to a fee calculator, which asks for the zip code. Entering the zip code yields the $3.47 answer. We also confirmed this with a call to Ooma support, who said the fee starts after the 1st month.

I actually did the activation for her, and no, a credit card was not required. But we ended up giving them a credit card number so she could start porting her number to Ooma. I see the credit card info is recorded in her account, so I asked Ooma support if that would be the credit card that would be billed for the RRF, and they said yes.

lbmofo: You are very helpful. Thanks. It seems I have no trouble to get the Telo work and I have never used Qwest tech support, so chance is low for me to ever use ooma’s tech support. But $20 per case still worries me because Telo is lot more complex than a telephone jack. I already need at least a year to recoup my $250 investment. I do not want to spend more because the motive for me to make the switch is to save some money, not to say my Telo is supposed to have one year warranty. I think ooma should have a more clear definition about what kind of support is free and what is billable. I will send ooma an email to see what they would say.

Have a good day everybody!

Cool, please share what you find out. Unless the trouble requires ooma intervention such as provisioning, help is readily available on this forum.