<p>While alot of forks have switched to 100% cell phone. There are some of us who still need a home phone for one reason or the other.</p>
<p>We have been introduced and switched to OOMA. You buy this unit for less than $200 and never have a phone bill again. In some areas, you would still have to pay some monthly fees.</p>
<p>before the switch, we were using one of very popular VOIP. The voice quality was just very bad. Upgrading to a 7 MB internet service did not help. </p>
<p>The OOMA unit goes between the cable moden and the router, instead of after the router. So it gives the phone the priority of the full bandwidth. So far, we are very happy with the quality.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I don’t get any personal gain from this other than helping those in need save a couple $.</p>
<p>we bought our OOMA from Costco and love it. Replaced a piece of c#@$ Magic Jack. We like OOMA, as we have a beach house and it permits us to have conference calls and work from home during the summer. I had not heard they were going out of business; that would be bad news.</p>
<p>i looked for articles to indicate they were going out of business & instead found a few that includes OOMA in top tech gadgets for the holidays.</p>
<p>Some think that ooma will go out of business because they can’t see how the company will make money unless a lot of people sign up for the premier subscription plan. But these fears have been going on for at least a year…</p>
<p>I don’t know how Skype works, but we have the OOMA set up as our line #2, and we just pick up the phone and it operates like a regular phone number.</p>
<p>I have heard several friend say that they had problems when they used Vonage. Discovered that in the small micetype contract they’d given up rights to their phone #, so when they tried to switch to another carrier, they lost their phone #. I don’t have first hand experience with this, but be careful. Sometimes trying to save a few pennies can cost a lot more in headaches. We may set up skype, but aren’t planning to give up our landline. Cellphone service in our house stinks.</p>
<p>I love our home phone number & would never want to lose that. We have had several prolonged power outages in our neighborhood and home, so not sure we’ll ever want to go with any VOIP system–hubby definitely does NOT and he knows far more about phones than I. Our landline phone is only about $25/month or with DSL, $56/month. It seems reasonable for the pretty reliable service and high speeds we generally receive.</p>
<p>We do like our standard, however when the power goes out the cordless phones are worthless, so people scramble for the 1-2 corded phones in the house. I looked at the bill when it came it and there were no toll calls, we use either line #2 with OOMA or our cells phones. </p>
<p>Another idea we wished we thought of after we set up the OOMA number is that you can request a number for any area. If we thought ahead, I would have set it up as a local number for my mother, so she could call us at no charge. (she doesn’t have a cell phone and won’t even take me up on my offer to get her one and put her on our Verizon plan and we pick up the $10/month).</p>
<p>When adding the extra features (Skype In and Out) and independent phones that do not have to be connected to a computer, Skype offers a very robust system. Since Skype works on cell phones, the issue of losing power is a non-event. Skype offers the great benefit of being available anywhere where there is a web or cellular connection. It is extremely efficient for people who travel overseas.</p>