Ooma Preps Office Phone

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As so many of us have replaced both land and VoIP lines with cellular service, and given the telco-cable incumbents largely cornering the residential VoIP market, Ooma appears to have successfully expanded their telephonic services into business sector. And now, via the FCC, we learn Ooma intends to similarly expand their hardware into Cisco and Avaya territory with the corporate-looking DP1 Desk Phone. Although, interestingly, the DP1 manual indicates Ooma Telo hub pairing is required (and the display does indicate home office)… vs. Ooma Office. Presumably, this core competency initiative will fare better than their smart home aspirations that have been overshadowed by well-established and noisier competitors.

Back when the cellular providers offered very few minutes for very many dollars, I swore by Ooma – especially when working 3,000 miles from the office. And I will fondly remember them and their stellar performance as I currently drink of the unlimited Verizon and T-Mobile firehose (and try to take as few calls as possible).

4 thoughts on “Ooma Preps Office Phone”

  2. Nice find. There must be some internal changes to warrant the FCC submission. I’m old enough to remember when Ooma explicitly forbid business usage. Times change!

  3. They still do forbid business “volume” usage on the Home service (the soft enforced 5000 hours per month of call time or something like that). For that, Ooma Office exists.

    FWIW, haveing to always have the smart phone in range and with me in the house is still such a pain. Ooma is still priced so LOW that it is peanuts per month for keeping our decades OLD number (we got tracked down by relatives who we hadn’t seen in nearly 20 years) with ALL the premium features and NOT require a learning curve for HOME phone for the older folks and NOT having to give everybody our smartPhone numbers, has meant we are NEVER disturbed (OK, once in every 6 months) by calls we do not want. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been with people who take SPAM calls during our time together and have to apologize for the interruption and learn they handle SPAM calls quite frequently. In other words: advantages to keeping the Home phone model, but ONLY on Ooma’s great priced service. The MSO’s VoIP services are WAY too expensive (with all the extra goodies it can be something like $85 per month), especially when compared to Ooma with Premium, still $10 per month for EVERY feature.

    Anyway, I wonder of this “Home office” phone is the rumored new phone that would function with the latest Telo, not the previous version of Telo? Depending on its price, it could be worth it for some people who still like a desk phone somewhere in the house (I still have my desk phone directly connected to the Telo because when at the desk in the room we’ve designated the office, it is easier to handle, the speaker function and speed dial functions are EASIER when one is making appointments, calling professionals, getting all sorts of details taken care of when one has the desk calendar on the desk and taking notes, and operating the PC to confim info and log in to accounts–you know, SERIOUS HOME duty. And our multiple phones ring in the rooms they are in not missing a call to the smartphone connected for charging when we go to the kitchen or the other side of the house.

    Frankly, what Ooma really needs is MORE devices connecting wirelessly (4 is still the limit), work on the delay betwenn callers (although it does NOT bother me, it irritates too many), and a few other things I can’t remember. Otherwise Ooma is our phone brain (at home, as it should be) set to notify us if someone left a message, and then we can access via smartphone app, and we decide if we are in the mood to respond without having to mistakenly answer a call to the smartphone only to realize it is a PITA call or someone we know and love, but DO NOT want to talk to right now, and hear about how we don’t answer our smartphone when they call. :)

    But I do understand how the younglings get by with only a smartphone–constantly plugged in or seeking a plug, but Ooma provides a virtual NO LEARNING CURVE for anybody (seniors?) for a Home phone system that opearates like a POTS, but far better. As far as a Home phone/system and its advantages: “From my cold dying hands!”

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