Google Voice for home phone?
 

Right now we have an Atlantic Broadband plan with video, internet and phone. The price has really jumped so we are considering backing off to just internet. There are a lot of options for 25 +/- TV channels at a reasonable price. I have just started looking at phone options. As cell service is spotty at home in West Alton, we don't want to depend on just that.

There are standard options of VOIP such as Vonage and 1-VIOP that include a house phone adapter, phone # porting and 911 calling. These have monthly charges forever. Then Google Voice is a free service with a one time adapter purchase such as:
https://www.amazon.com/OBi200-1-Port...eywords=obi200
And then a yearly subscription to have 911 calling. Also phone number porting is not easy.

Anyone have experience with Google Voice? Other suggestions?

Ooma?
 

I can't search off my tablet, but I thought there was a recent thread that someone had talked about Ooma, a VOIP service. Perhaps you can search that.

Dave

I have used Ooma for years. It works great and you can buy the box for about $75. Best Buy has them and I am sure Amazon sells them too. I have a cordless phone base plugged into it and the second phone can obviously go anywhere.

You do have to pay the taxes which are about $4 per month but there is no monthly fee unless you take their optional services. I am not sure how Google would be able to do it without the taxes.

Before the cordless phone I ran a wire out of the Ooma box and plugged it into a wall jack in the bedroom the box is in. That back fed all of the phone outlets in the house and made them live.

Here is a link to Ooma:

https://www.ooma.com/promo/ooma-get-connected

Thanks,

My understand is that Google Voice is pure internet, no connection to local 911 services. To get 911 service requires a companion non Google service contract in the range of $45/year +/- which includes taxes such as the local 911 tax. You do get a lifetime phone number assigned by Google; you can pick from available numbers in your area code. You have to use the $50 box linked to in my 1st post to connect to your home phone system and to get 911 service. I will look into Ooma.

I am pretty sure I have 911 service with my Ooma phone. I do have to remember to change the location when I take the box to Florida, otherwise it would be calling the Gilford Police if I dialed911.

You can port any number you currently have over to the VOIP phone. I have a 603 number with a Gilford exchange. I know many people who have dropped their land line phone but taken their home phone number to the VOIP service so there is a seamless transition.

Early adopters don't pay any fees at all to Ooma. Ooma originally promised no fees for life and they have followed through on that promise for those customers. I've never payed a cent to Ooma except for the upgrade to their newer box last year.

Lately I've realized that the free phone service bundled into my Comcast service has much better features than the basic Ooma service so I may port my number over to Comcast and abandon Ooma. According to Ooma I've saved about $5000 using their service and I think that's about right.

There are also some options to explore... I can't remember which cell phone provider, but at one point there was one that advertised having a base that you could buy for your home, that the phone could call through if you had poor wifi at home....

As it turns out, doing a quick search it looks like all the cell phone companies provide this service.... the term used is Wi Fi calling... looking at Verizon, whom I use it appears that this service is free, if you phone is capable of it... (note I haven't read all the fine print yet).....

Ooma does have 911 service and apparently reasonable pricing so that is a strong candidate. We currently have a 603-293-xxxx number that years ago we ported to then Metrocast and it would be nice to port that again as Ooma does offer porting.

One issue that we now have is the volume of robocalls that spoof a local caller ID. They all go to voice mail so every few days I have to delete many one second voice mails. Ooma does claim robocall blocking. Any comments as to how well it works?

Ooma Premium works with Nomorobo but Ooma's basic "free" service doesn't. That's one reason I'll probably switch from Ooma to Comcast. Comcast offers the Nomorobo service for free.

I have Ooma at home. I wasn't an early adopter, so I pay about $5 per month in southern NH which covers all the taxes. This gives me country wide unlimited free calls.

It's really a good service, and does have 911, but you have to remember to change your address if you move your "box" to a different address.

I connect it to my internal home phone lines by connecting it to a wall jack in my home, so all the hard wired phones in the house work as well as they did when we had "Ma Bell" service! Of course I had to be sure to disconnect my house from the street POTS wired service, but this was easy to do at the network interface on the side of my home. It also works well with cordless phones in the house.

When I have lost power during weeks long periods of time, with my house on generator power, this all still works well! While my neighbors that use Comcast cable for their phone and internet service lost everything. I'm on fiber from Consolidated Communications (they originally were the old Verizon/Ma Bell back in the day), it seems much more reliable than cable for internet/phone as reported by my neighbors.

This fiber internet even remained working when power was off for a few weeks back in 2008! For this reason, I'll never use cable (Comcast or others) for internet until they can survive multi weeks long power outages like the fiber optic system can. They tell you it will survive power outages, but in practice, it only works for a few hours to a day, then it starts to go down.

The only downside to fiber in NH is that they never allowed for TV service over the fiber, even though the system is technically capable of it (see FIOS in Mass. as a comparison). This is mostly a political/contractual issue, but it's becoming less of a problem now that most are cutting the cord from cable TV companies.

Nomorobo
 

Don,

Thanks for the info, I've just added the Nomorobo feature to my Comcast Voice. Easy setup, now we'll see how well it actually works.

Bill

Update:

I did sign up for Ooma and it is working out fine. I did get the Telo Air 2 with wifi as I wanted flexibility as to where the unit was located.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The base service here is $5.24/month. Premier, which includes nomorobo adds $10.70/month including tax and fees.

My local 603-293-xxxx number has been ported and works fine. Porting is included in the premier service otherwise it is a $40 charge to port. They say it takes 3 weeks normally, ours took 2 weeks.

This is cheap and simple
 

I use this for my Home phone.. Had it for years..Atlantic for the net, Hulu box for TV...It's all good https://www.tracfone.com/?lang=en

Google Voice
 

I have a nice setup for Google Voice. Google Voice is running in an old tablet, Ellipse 7, which is Bluetoothed to an xlink adapter. The xlink adapter is plugged into the house jack to power the phone lines.
The Ellipse 7 uses the Consolidated Comm. ethernet. It can go through a wireless router but I choose the ethernet jack.
When the cable is down I switch Bluetooth device to my cellphone.
Running this setup for a few years now, no problems.
Handy Google Voice feature is the voice mail to text feature.

Why not just throw the google voice app on your cell and use that for calls? You can also set your phone up to use your wifi at home for VOIP while in range or if available and it'll swap over to LTE when not. Seems like you/re running a whole lot of extra stuff for no reason.

My only observation with google voice is that it does seem to drop lots of calls.

My setup is great when you have limited phone coverage. My cell constantly dropped calls because I only have one bar and less where I am located.

Also the miss is old fashioned, she choose to use the princess phone. :)