Cheap phone bill days are ahead with Ooma

I'm not sure why I didn't try this trick a long time ago to get a cheap phone bill. Plus there's more service …

I grew up with a rotary dial phone. That dates me a bit.

For literally my entire life I've had access to a phone (either my parents' or my own) that connected me to the outside world through traditional phone lines.

Maybe one in fifteen calls is legitimate

Our landline phone service was about as basic as Verizon offered.

It had almost no extra features. No call waiting, or caller ID, or anything really extra. Our number was listed.

It rang in at $42/month. (Hah! Rang! I'll be here all week, folks …)

And we got garbage calls all the time: charities, surveys, robocalls, scams, telemarketers, political calls, bill collectors for people who either lived here before or gave the number out somewhere.

Well over 90% of the calls were just plain bothersome.

But I dared not get rid of the landline

If our cell phones had better coverage at home, I would have dropped the landline a long time ago. But the cell coverage at our location is spotty enough that I just couldn't feel comfortable doing it.

Even if the landline was annoying, it was reliable. If someone called the number, they'd get through. And there were people that I needed to be able to get in touch with me.

Ooma: My broadband solution to a cheap phone bill

Even if our cell coverage isn't the greatest, our internet service is pretty reliable. It's rarely down here.

So a Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) phone would be a good way to wrest control of my landline out of the phone company.

The particular solution we got was an Ooma Telo. The device goes in between our cable modem (actually our router) and our current phone. The call quality is excellent and there's only a slight delay in the voice compared to the regular phone lines.

1. We bought the equipment. We got a refurbished unit for about $20 less than a new unit.
2. We didn't get the Bluetooth option. There's an option for getting the Ooma unit with a Bluetooth transponder. We didn't get this one. We didn't mind moving the phone system near the router, and the connection almost certainly would be better and faster.
3. We hooked it up easily according to the instructions. As far as installing a piece of telephony equipment goes, it was a piece of cake. Things just worked. We were able to call to and from the phone immediately, with caller ID! (Yeah, that's included.) The phone worked with our traditional four-handset wireless phone system out of the box.
4. We began our phone number port. The length of time that Ooma predicted it would take — a month — initially worried us a bit. (By contrast, porting my cell phone number to Republic Wireless took only a couple of days.)
5. We had the phone number ported in four days. Thankfully, moving the phone number over to Ooma didn't take anywhere near a month. It was done in four days.
6. We called to cancel our landline with Verizon. Actually, we didn't even have to call up. Verizon let us know that we'd receive a final bill near the end of the month, and that was it.

Payback time and features

The Ooma device cost $60, refurbished. Normally, porting our current number costs $40, but we went ahead and bought a year of Premier service for $120, which included the number port. (We decided to port our number because we didn't want the hassle of calling up every. single. business that had our phone number to change it.) Beyond that, we'll pay a little under $5/month in taxes.

Over the course of this year, then, we'll have paid $240, or $20/month. That puts us at breakeven within six months, including the purchase of the equipment and porting the number.

A year from now, it will be either $15/month if we continue Premier, or $5/month if we don't. It's a cheap phone bill no matter how you slice it.

Either way, we slashed our landline bill by more than half, and we have more features than we did before. Some of the features that we have now that we didn't before:

• Call waiting, call forwarding, call return, caller ID, caller ID block (these come free)
• Free domestic calling with the Ooma App (free)
• Anonymous and spammer call blocking, and call whitelisting (Premier)
• Call forwarding (Premier)
• Multiple ring tones and patterns (Premier)
• Three-way calling (Premier)
• Lots of app stuff that we'll use eventually (Premier)
• Lots of smart home stuff that we probably won't use (Premier)
• And lots more

So far, so good!

So far we're pleased with Ooma. We're looking forward to getting more service for our cheap phone bill. Win-win!