Staying with Ooma...

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Charles R
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Joined:Fri Aug 05, 2011 4:35 pm
Staying with Ooma...

Post by Charles R » Fri May 25, 2012 9:34 am

I have been using my Telo for a fairly long time. Certainly long enough to determine what type of performance I'm going to get (regardless if it could be better via some unknown tweaks, etc). Frankly, I have never been impressed with the service. Uptime has been great with only one outage that I remember via Ooma. However, call quality has never been satisfactory and often down right embarrassing.

I see one of their competitors is offering free porting and their annual cost is slightly less ($29.99 a year). Their initial investment is pretty much zero (compared to what I pay now) as it includes a year of service and costs $49.99. Since the monthly cost is so close I have no interest in switching to save money (what little their would be) rather I'd really like higher call quality.

Has anyone used several of the competing products and noticed any real difference between them. I'd guessing you know who I'm referencing and it's not magicJack. Feature wise I don't care as it's simply a seldom used phone and call quality and uptime trumps everything else. I'm not looking to switch just to switch... everything being equal I'd rather stay put... just can't help but wonder if the grass is greener over there.

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lbmofo
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Re: Staying with Ooma...

Post by lbmofo » Fri May 25, 2012 2:46 pm

Grass is likely brown & dead over there.

Ooma is ranked #1 again this year.
/viewtopic.php?t=13827
Charles R wrote:...call quality has never been satisfactory and often down right embarrassing.
This is not normal; likely issues with your setup.

Take a look at this Voice Quality Issues thread for your reference: viewtopic.php?t=10023

Charles R
Posts:67
Joined:Fri Aug 05, 2011 4:35 pm

Re: Staying with Ooma...

Post by Charles R » Fri May 25, 2012 7:23 pm

lbmofo wrote:
Charles R wrote:...call quality has never been satisfactory and often down right embarrassing.
This is not normal; likely issues with your setup.

Take a look at this Voice Quality Issues thread for your reference: viewtopic.php?t=10023
I have hunted that ghost way back when for several weeks. Tried multiple Internet lines, a couple of Telos, in front of and after a router and nothing really changed. Yes - I pass those checklists with flying colors. Also, when I created the Call Quality thread my rating (number) pretty much turned out to be the average rating... And lastly when I was actively reading this Forum it was normal reading such... feel free to disagree.

Whether the grass is greener or not I can't really say. I will say I called their support line and it was 2 hours of waiting and even less helpful afterwards. It was virtually impossible to find out what I would actually be charged annually... it's $29.99 plus taxes... no way they can tell what the taxes will be! At least until you convince them other wise.

I found their forum and it reflected pretty much the satisfaction level here and looking at Amazon's reviews... far worse than Ooma's so at this moment I'm staying put. Unless I decide I want to go through weeks of trying to improve my call quality once again. :)


Upstream jitter 0.0 ms
Downstream jitter 0.5 ms
Upstream packet loss 0.0 %
Downstream packet loss 0.0 %
Upstream packet order 100.0 %
Downstream packet order 100.0 %
Packet discards 0.0 %
MOS 4.1
REGISTER ms 423 ms
INVITE ms 351 ms
BYE ms 4 ms
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GMOOMA
Posts:105
Joined:Fri Apr 27, 2012 2:14 pm

Re: Staying with Ooma...

Post by GMOOMA » Wed May 30, 2012 4:12 pm

There was only one other voip competitor that seemed to have higher call quality.. but their service was a strict 3k minute cap (that should narrow it down a bit) but was a cheaper overall investment (in the short run.. OOMA wins out past 18 months) and there were probably some other dealbreaker issues regarding number portability. The only other service is skype which can use a variable bit-rate codec to adjust sound quality. However, since the typical setup is to use analog handsets with ooma the sound quality doesn't have to be higher than a 64kbit channel both up & down. ISDN lines used to run on 64 & 128 bit channels and have studio quality sound. Can't imagine it should be worse than that. So that average dsl line can run a few lines simultaneously.. and the higher bandwidth the better for obvious reasons along with low latency. ISDN lines had super low latency which was most important. Average latency from NY to CA is about 80ms with a +- ballpark of 35% for any other 2k+ mile route. I think ISDN lines got this down to about 50ms, but understand ISDN was NOT the internet NOR VOIP.

I seem to get static aong side my voice mail messages.. anyone else experience this ?

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