My new telphone II

So I was ready to ditch my AT&T home phone service. I bought a Ooma Core system and followed their somewhat lengthy but essential steps towards making it my primary home phone.

I browsed to ooma.com and registered my unit, and chose to port my existing phone number (for a steep $40 one time fee!) It's a two step process - first I need to put my DSL on a dry loop, that means closing my DSL account and open a new one. That raised my DSL monthly fee from $28 to $35! Those idiots. After that happened, I signed through (online) the paper work to have my number ported over. They said the process would take a month but in effect took less than 2 weeks.

Meanwhile, I could still set my Ooma hub up with a temporary number. As a networking profession, I respected my collegaues over at Ooma, and followed the set up procedure laid out in the manual, to the letter. And that was cool in several ways.

First, set up was easy and took only 15 minutes, most of which spent with the unit synchronizing with the service. But more importantly, I did not anticipate that how it was supposed to be set up: the Ooma hub sits between my wireless router and my DSL modem, and detects the PPPoE settings! That's pretty amazing. It then acts as a router and my wireless router becomes a second hop router.

But I have other plans. I know Ooma advises users to connect the unit directly to the modem because of QoS reasons, and my little many years old Netgear doesn't QoS. But I am not comfortable being 2 hops away from the ISP (I won't know the difference, I know), so I decided to let the Ooma hub do all the routing, DHCP, etc, and use my Netgear as just a wireless switch. Works great.



I never thought I care about QoS, but sometimes, perhaps peace of mind is enough. Like the other day my mother picked up the phone and started talking... should I pause by Hulu TV? I would have worried if I didn't know QoS was there.

Another interesting thing was, I noticed the first call after reboot had echoes. And then they would go away and the calls will be clear there after. I wonder if it did some kind of dynamic adjustment or something.

Overall, call quality was good consider my slow DSL. But it wasn't without issues.