Saturday, November 10, 2007

ooma stopped working today


Bad news today.

The blue light is on (which is supposed to mean it's working) and I get the ooma dial tone, but when I dial a number, I get an immediate busy signal, no matter what number I dial.

Since this is the first time I that I've needed technical support, I'm also just now discovering that it isn't great. I realize it is a Saturday, but nobody answers at Chat or phone. I'll see how long it takes to get an answer back to my email.

The Chat system appears somewhat broken too. It says "Next in queue, Estimated wait time 0 minutes, 37 seconds" but nobody ever actually picks up.

I also found nothing helpful in the knowledgebase/FAQs and there is no forum that I can find.

UPDATE 11/12/2007: Calls are working again. Apparently this was my first experience with an ooma system outage. I'm not sure exactly how long it lasted, but I know there was a window of about four hours where I couldn't make calls but I didn't try again until the next day and by then it was working again, so I'm not sure when they fixed it. It could be worse. Hopefully this will be a rare occurrence. They might save themselves some trouble by putting some kind "system status" page on their support website.

Saturday, November 3, 2007

Up and running

It took a little while to get everything setup and working, but my ooma service is now fully operational (including phone service changes, which I'm still unclear about).

The hub is bigger than I expected but feels very solid in construction.

Call quality so far has been quite good, but there is a faint "buzz" in the background that isn't there if I bypass the hub and connect directly to the phone line.

The voicemail is pretty cool, but I wish I could get the messages as an attachment in email. ooma lacks some of the features I had with Vonage, such as ringing several phones when people call. I also miss the softphone feature. But it's nice not to have monthly fees!

I've seen some people complain about the little "ooma tone" that both parties hear on all calls, but I'm not bothered by it, and so far nobody I've called has been either.