Plus you don't need to buy extra Ooma Scouts for each extension unless you want the answering machine function in that room. If you want to do that, you'll have to open up the termination box on the outside of your home to check the wiring. Ooma doesn't provide any instructions on how to do this, but you can find do-it-yourself home wiring directions on competitor Vonage's Web site.
If a scenario like this scares you or you don't know your way around a multi-tester, you might want to hire an electrician to do the job -- or just buy a cordless phone with several remotes and forget about it.
In my case the feed from this box lead to a simple connection point in the basement that allowed for easy disconnection of the street feed from the rest of my home wiring. The telephone company termination box on my house. A bit scary, isnt' it? The black wire at left is the telco feed. The rest of the mess at right are telephone wires going into the house. One final note here: The Ooma hub can power both Scouts and other extensions in your house. But because each uses different signaling Ooma will need to provide two feeds into your telephone wall jack.
To do this you run two telephone patch cords: one from the "wall" output jack and one from the "phone" output jack on the hub [Photo]. A provided splitter goes into your wall jack and provides two RJ11 sockets. Connect both wires to that and you're done. I replaced my phone service with Ooma over the past month. During that time I experienced three dropped calls. However, those issues may have had to do with how I initially connected Ooma It's supposed to go be directly connected to your cable or DSL modem, not a secondary router, as I did.
Since I changed that around the service has operated just fine. In his review, Preston Gralla describes "tinny" call quality. Although the Ooma dial tone did sound a bit lower in volume and perhaps tinnier than my land line or Vonage phone, voice quality during actual calls was generally as good or better than with my land line. Ooma has a knowledge base, FAQ, online manuals, forums, and direct support via e-mail support hour turnaround and a toll free support hot line. Personally I don't have much patience with the forums.
Telephone support is restricted to Pacific Time business hours pm; pm on weekends. It took about 30 seconds to cycle through the automated attendant options and one minute before I was speaking with a live support person.
I was on the phone with a technician within one minute on my first try. Jose, based in the company's Palo Alto headquarters, correctly diagnosed the problem I described and offered to walk me through resolving it.
The online test can identify jitter, packet loss and other issues that could affect call quality. Try running the service before buying a product like Ooma to help ensure that it's going to work for you. I did test Ooma's e-mail support as well and received a helpful response to my inquiry within the promised 24 hour timeframe. As I begin packing up the Ooma equipment, I find myself seriously contemplating ordering Ooma. As I write this, Amazon. Ooma's not perfect. If the power goes out you lose your phone service, as you do with any VoIP telephone service.
And if the unit gets fried in a thunder storm or you break it you're out of luck until you can get a new one. These days, though, most folks have a cell phone, and by going to the Ooma Web site you can configure the service to forward inbound calls to a cell phone or any other number. With VoIP, you have far more flexibility in voice services than you ever had with plain old telephone service. For example, you can take your telephone with you by simply moving your adapter.
Ooma does come with some risks. Posted by: volcs0. We have a five-handset system plugged into the Hub. All voicemail is handled through our Google Voice account. We had any use for the Scout in our setup. Sorry, only registered users may post in this forum. Click here to login. Online Users lost in space , Thrift Store Scott. Record Number of Users: on February 20, Record Number of Guests: on October 03, Read our TOS.
All other copyrights are property of their respective holders. Posted by: space-time Date: February 13, PM. Posted by: onthedownlow Date: February 13, PM. Posted by: space-time Date: February 14, AM.
Craig J. Mathias is a principal with Farpoint Group, an advisory firm specializing in wireless networking and mobile computing. Here are the latest Insider stories. More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider.
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