My new telephone III

Unlimited free phone calls within the US is nice, especially when many parts of the bay area are considered long distance from where I live. There are other add-on features like online mailbox, huh, my cordless phone has a digitial answering machine, so no thanks. But the part that I can really use? Caller-ID. I've never had caller-ID in my life (call me whatever). I never knew the joy of screening calls! Sunday morning the phone rings, instead of getting up or wondering who the eff, my cordless phone speaks out the calling number (or caller's name if it is in the address book). I didn't even know my cordless phone could do that. More sleep for me.

Did I mention free? $25 a month in my pocket from now on. Yipee.

The problem is though, when I ported my number over, AT&T made me put my DSL on another phone line. I suspect that was the noisy pair of wires cause after that, my DSL was actually almost 10% slower. I was upset. And you know what upset customers do? They switch.

Everybody knows cable is faster than DSL. Comcast in my area offers the same speed cable internet for the same price. But because I am a Comcast TV customer, they knocked $8 off. More bandwidth for less, are you kidding me?

I bought a Linksys cable modem, and while I was at it, I updated myself with a Linksys wireless-N router that does QoS. Hm... I'm gonna put my Ooma behind my router one day.

I did discover the downside of VoIP though. Turned out it was because of a loose connector but my cable went out the second day I had it. Boom, all of a sudden no phone, no internet. I was left with my cell phone, that was pretty scary.

There is actually another reason why I want the Ooma behind my router - I can configure port forwarding, but it won't open those ports, like it just ignores my settings. I need port forwarding for... I am not telling you, nice try.



New modem, new router and new phone at all once. It's too much for me.

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.