The Ordeal of Changing from Land Line to VOIP Phone Service Part 1

This blog entry and some to follow describe my experience converting from land line service to a Voice Over IP. The last entry in this series will be "lessons learned."

I’ve been looking at the possibility of dropping my land line service for some time. From a business point of view, the land line doesn’t make any sense:

• We are paying for DSL, at the speed and quality that should support Voice over IP (VOIP).
• The phone service costs somewhere around $70/mo for unlimited long distance + local calls. VOIP can be either free or much less expensive. In fact, I should save over $900/yr the first year and about $700/yr after that
• The service level agreement with our provider- AT&T, states that, when there are problems, DSL has priority over voice. So we should get better maintenance service than we would with the phone line.
• I've used Skype for several years. As my DSL speeds have improved, so has Skype quality. Video quality can sometimes be a problem, especially when the video goes from my system to a G3 cellphone system on the other end. But voice quality is great.
• There is more functionality with a VOIP phone than a land phone.

I've delayed converting for a few reasons:

• You'd think cell phone service would suffice for backup. We have cell phone service and I have to have a fairly high number of minutes on that service to handle my business phone calls.  But, as most of you have experienced, there are many homes in our communities, including mine, where cell phone service is iffy:  anywhere from 0 1x bars or a white and red no service symbol to 3 3x bars- at the same spot in the house! However, as a whole, our cellphone service is reliable.
• I've been warned that voice quality would not be good. There is the possibility that when both ends talk simultaneously, the signals will "collide," making the conversation muddled.
• VOIP does use bandwidth. So, if someone is downloading a lot of data, voice might be impacted. (This can be managed with router settings or by having the right VOIP box plugged in to your Router.)

When Costco had a sale on the OOMA Telo Air, I thought it was time to make the change. The Telo is a router-sized device.  You plug your house phone, in our case the base station, and an ethernet connection into the Telo. (Optionally, you can use wifi.)
Note that the phone numbers, etc stored in your base station remain accessible; you don't have to reenter all your stored numbers and recent phone calls.

This service is similar to Vonage, but you buy the Telo device. You don’t a fee unless you want their Premium service. You do pay taxes(about $4/mo).

I read through the directions on how to change from AT&T to OOMA.  As written, OOMA says you just sign up and you are given a phone number and off you go.  That’s true.  But we, of course, don’t want the inconvenience of changing our telephone number.  OOMA offers to transfer the number for $40. It is a simple exercise for OOMA. ATT gives them an OK to use the number and they enter it in their database.  OOMA warns you that the carrier might take a while to give the OK because of what ATT has to do, which I’ll spend a couple of blog entries detailing.  But it doesn’t sound like a big deal, maybe a half day.

Well... I'm writing this without internet service. The process started 10 days ago and I'm still without either phone or DSL service- We had phone service for 5 days but have been without both for another 4 days. I'm writing this offline. When you read this is when the DSL service was finally restored and I could upload it. I'll give you a final count at that time.