Ooma phone: ditch phone bills!

My wife and I tried Vonage when service was first available so were skittish about internet telephony. But this Ooma phone looked too good to pass up: no phone bills after you buy the equipment!

We tried it for about 4 months and then cancelled our Qwest line, transferringour number to the Ooma phone ... and then started having what seemed like the same trouble we'd had with Vonage before cancelling them: intermittent cut-outs of voice traffic, it seemed.

But ... even though the main phone user in our house, lovely Kate, was complaining about Ooma, I began to notice that I could still send a fax now and then without much trouble, that callers could leave messages ...

It turned out that the problem wasn't Ooma at all, but the extremely well used cordless phone that lovely Kate had used until its microphone died. ("I can hear them but they can't hear me.") We changed out that phone for its barely-used twin Uniden, and voila! Ooma is back and working fine!

We do pay them $10/month for an extra service that gives us a second line (not that we ever need that) and some other call manipulation stuff that we do like, like block lists and the ability to simultaneously ring a cell phone, etc.

Overall: highly recommended. And I have no relation to Ooma other than a satisfied customer.